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Introduction
Olympus ended production and sales of the OM series of cameras and lenses several years ago and focused their attention on developing a ground-up digital camera system. This system abandoned the base of over 25 years in OM series products. However, they did toss the users a bone by making available an adaptor to mount the OM series lenses on the E-1 body. Recently, the E-300 was introduced which carries the 4/3 system forward.
Caveat
Olympus didn't want to make this adaptor available for several reasons, but an argument can be made that it was primarily profit and sales oriented. With the adaptor comes warnings as to which lenses can be used with the E-1 and what settings to use. Further warnings (especially from the marketing department), point out vignetting, lack of resolution, etc. Of course, there is the fact that you must MANUALY FOCUS the lens and stop down the aperture manually. All of these warnings failed to sway the diehards who just went ahead and tried to see what could be done with the old lenses which Olympus claims are not up to digital photography.
Not having an E-1 at the time, but in an effort to see if the E-1 was capable of being used with several of my prized Zuiko lenses I asked Bill Barber to assist me as he not only has an E-1, the same lenses I have, and is an excellent photographer who's shooting style is similar to my own. I want to publicly thank Bill for his efforts and the CD-ROM he sent me with a multitude of test images which I could only display a few of on this website.
All photographs on this page (and their full-sized files available on request) are Copyright 2004 Bill Barber. Absolutely no unauthorized use of these photos are permitted without his direct permission.
All photographs were taken using ISO 200 and in-camera JPEG processing. No sharpening was performed on the full-sized images either in-camera or in post-production. Three lenses were selected and the primary interest is macro photography so they also include extension tubes. The images shown on this page were resized in THE GIMP and sharpened to compensate for the scaling operation. They are JPEG compressed at 93%.
My general observations
I was amazed at the lack of luminosity fall-off towards the edges. This totally flies in the face of Olympus' marketing department's claims about the parallel light path designs of the new lenses. The sharpness of the images is also excellent and is a testament to the excellent lenses produced for 25 years. The Bokeh characteristics were also of great interest to me and this configuration did not disappoint. A side observation concerns the E-1 itself. Bill shot these images at ISO 200, which is not the quietest setting, but remained quite acceptable. The imaging noise is remarkably "film like", a characteristic many cameras have been attributed with, but few actually deliver. I'm quite pleased with the noise characteristics of the E-1 as well as the overall "color".
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