Olympus has suffered a lot of bad press recently with the outbreak of bad corporate decisions and “fee payment” coverups. I’m not one to speculate about international corporate scandal, for several reasons; I don’t have all the facts, and I don’t care. As long as Olympus continues to crank out quality products, I’ll continue to buy them. I’ve owned several Olympus cameras several of which were the PEN line of cameras. I fell in love with the Micro Four-Thirds (M4/3) system, shared by Olympus and Panasonic, right around the time the Panasonic AF-100 became popular with its’ modest sensor and versatile lens mount options. The M4/3 system is extremely flexible in that adapters can be used for just about any lens mount. From Leica R to Arri PL mount, almost any lens can be mounted to a M4/3 camera with little to no hassle. Other than the vast array of lens options I really appreciate the inherent compactness of almost all of the M4/3 cameras. Wether it’s the relatively miniature Panasonic AF-100, or a pocketable PEN camera, I can’t get enough of the M4/3 system. My introduction to the PEN line was rather careless. I never thought I would adopt such a fledgling standard and grow to prefer it over other systems that have been around for decades. A little background on my E-PL1: It was purchased as a test mule for lens evaluation when it first came out. I knew that I could mount all of the cinema glass I was servicing and testing to it and thought it would be useful for real world image testing. The small sensor wasn’t a big deal since I was only looking for basic center image test results. The camera did indeed provide vital test results but eventually we moved onto larger sensor cameras for test mules in order to evaluate frame coverage and edge illumination falloff more often. The E-PL1 was retired to my bench where I occasionally snapped photos of interesting subjects for use on my twitter or blog. At this time, I regularly used, and still do, a Nikon D700 with an arsenal of lenses for my hobbyist shooting around town and on vacation.
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