Olympus PEN E-P5 review

The new Olympus PEN E-P5 impressed us when we got a recent hands-on at a London event. The latest PEN is a big step up over the previous model, it has a wealth of better positioned controls and a sharper display too. It looks great too, with a retro-style that appealed to us but which isn’t as extreme as the recent Olympus OM-D E-M5.

Back to the controls the first you’ll notice is the twin control dials, falling under your thumb and forefinger. As with the E-M5 you can set these up to control pretty much anything you like and simultaneously flick through two settings, with graphical prompts at the top and bottom of the screen. With ISO on one and aperture priority on the other we could easily rattle through a variety of shots.

The display is a 3in LCD with a 1m dots. That’s twice as many dots as on the mid-range E-PL5 and 50% more than the OLED panel on the E-M5 or the outgoing E-P3. You can tell too, as it looks pin-sharp. There’s an optional viewfinder add-on, but those wanting a viewfinder are better-served with the current E-M5.

The screen tilts upwards till it sits flat and downwards by about 45 degrees, it’s a decent amount of flexibility but it pales in comparison to the E-PL5, which can flick right around and point forward too.

One thing we didn’t get a chance to properly play with was the new Wi-Fi support. The E-P5 has built-in Wi-Fi without the need for a special card or adaptor. Using an app you can take remote control of the camera and activate the shutter, you can assign GPS data from your phone to photos shot on your camera and share photos directly from the camera (via a Wi-Fi network or your handset). All pretty much par for the course these days, but we’re keen to see how well Olympus manages all this.

The sensor is the same 16.1-megapixel example as we saw in the E-M5, so we don’t expect to see any great change in image quality. It does have a faster top shutter speed of 1/8000s, speaking of which the shutter noise itself is rather pleasing, precise but not sharp-sounding. We took some test shots with the new camera and were pleased as usual with Olympus’s bright and colourful JPEGs.

The new E-P5 looks to be everything we want from a PEN camera. At present you can find it to pre-order around the web, but in body-only form at £899. We hope to see that price drop when the camera becomes widely available.