pedro_vasconcelos1

I recently bought a mint E-1 with the 14-54mm. For the same money I could have bought the E-300 dual zoom kit.

Reasons I went with the E-1, in order of importance:

1) the better kit lens (2/3 stop faster at the longer end)

2) better viewfinder (100% and higher eyepoint -- I wear glasses), viewfinder info in the bottom (E-300 is on the right, harder to see with glasses)

3) the top info LCD (useful to check setting at a glance, without using the color TFT)

4) external WB sensor (should make auto-wb more accurate)

5) quieter and better dampened shutter release

6) rugged construction, weather sealed body and lens

To summarize, the E-1 seems to handle faster, with every important function associated with an external button (no need to go into menus). What you lose is megapixels and the internal flash (the E-1 like many pro cameras has no internal flash).

The E-300 is still a good camera, it is just a bit more "mass-market" oriented and some costs were cut. The market seems to prefer more megapixels to better viewfinders and uncluttered operation.

It is really very instructive to try them out, find a store that carries both and ask to handle them, shoot a few frames.

I used PS 5 LE on Window$ for a while (came bundled with a scanner I bought). I now use Gimp 2.0 on Linux exclusively. I did not find the interface to be *that* different between the two: Gimp is slightly less polished and not all plugins have a consistent look. It doesn't have all the features of more recent PS, but it has all I need as an amateur photographer including layers, curves & levels, selection & masks, sharpening, suport many image formats including digital camera RAW (rawphoto plugin), lens barrel & chromatic aberration correction (panotools plugin) and high quality inkjet print dithering (for some Epson and Canon printers at least).

Like PS it gives you image processing building blocks that you can combine to achive your particular results rather than "one-touch" solutions -- so the learning curver is higher than simple apps but it is more generally applicable.

I've conducted an experiment shooting the same images as RAW and SHQ

jpegs with my Olympus C5050Z, then using the free dcraw converter to

develop the raw files under linux.

I managed to get a handle on the exposure, gamma and color controls,

but I found that the resoluting images had more color aliasing than

the in-camera jpegs (particularly noticeable on metal railings, etc.).

I know this is a result of the Bayer pattern interpolation, but

aparently the camera does it better than dcraw, which sort of defeats

the point of using a raw converter. I was a bit disapointed because I

was under the impression that the dcraw code is used by several

third-party products and with "professional" DSLRs --- but the results

I get seem worse than a pro-summer camera internal algorithms...

Is this aliasing problem specific to this particular camera? Is there

is any way around it?

Two suggestions: reduce the camera sharpnening to -2 or -3 and shoot at ISO 64 (the program mode will try to use this if possible when the ISO is set to AUTO).

Incidentaly, if you are going to critically inspect image detail, you might find visible HQ compression artifacts that are not noise. I would use SHQ compression or even TIFF just to get a better idea of the image quality the camera is capable of.

Stanley: I too was concerned with reports on noise and CA with the Olympus, but the results in practice have been pretty good.

One issue with noise is simply to tune down the in-camera sharpening a little bit (-2 on a scale -5..5). This reduces the apparent noise and maintains resolution of fine detail.

The other issue is to keep the ISO low. I find that the camera program mode almost always chooses iso 64 and occasionally goes to iso 125 (this was shooting indoors, handheld without flash).

I have seen a slight evidence of CA at the wide-end, but this only visible if you zoom over 100% on Photoshop, otherwise it is just a slight softening of edge contrast. No it is not as good as my Contax G lenses, but I find it very acceptable given the price and features of the Olympus.

I think the main problem is that the optical designs are really optimized for film. Digital sensors operate best at when the light hits at normal angle, whereas the rangefinder lenses make use of the very short back focal distance to oblique incidence angles, particularly for wide angle lenses.

In short: you'd get massive vignetting, much more so than with SRL lenses.

I have played around with a friend's G3 and ended up buying the Olympus 5050. I liked the Olympus ergonomics better: hand grip, position of the optical viewfinder, control menus, highly configurable default settings, twin types of media and AA batteries.

I think you should be able to get very decent prints from any of these cameras but the ergonomics makes the difference between a camera that you enjoy taking pictures with or not. You have to decide for yourself.

BTW, I held the Sony V1 in my hands and it was absolutely clear that camera was not an option for me -- it is just too small, just like a "boutique" Ixus like compact. But that's just me!