Olympus E-PL1 versus Sony NEX3 — Micro-Four-Thirds and APS-C — Review

© 2011 Peter Free

 

19 December 2011

 

 

Putting my conclusion first — Different sensor sizes and system concepts, but surprisingly equal for generalist purposes

 

Sony NEX3

 

If you need a flash, but don’t want to carry a large external flash, choose the NEX.

 

If you do a lot dimly lit indoor photography and refuse to noise process, choose the NEX.

 

If you intend to use a camera mostly on automatic, choose the NEX.

 

If you want to minimize post-processing, choose the NEX.

 

If you want to get the equivalent of a 24mm wide-angle lens (which means 16mm on the NEX and 12mm on the E-PL1), without spending a fortune, choose the NEX.

 

If you are partial tilting LCD screens, choose the NEX.

 

Olympus E-PL1

 

If you need a hot-shoe, so that you can add a competent external flash or a flash-controlling radio remote to the camera, choose the E-PL1.

 

If you have a size threshold that insists that your camera and its zoom lens fit reasonably easily in an average sized jacket pocket, choose the E-PL1 with its collapsible kit lens.

 

If you are rabidly averse to point-and-shoot menus, choose the E-PL1.

 

If you need a reasonably complete lens system today, and are confident that Sony and Samsung are not soon going to eat the smaller micro-four-thirds sensor for lunch, choose the E-PL1.

 

In all other respects, these two cameras are equally capable and equally easy to use in the real world.  That’s true, even with regard to using legacy (film) lenses.

 

You can find my mini-review of the Olympus E-PL1 here.

 

 

Why this Olympus E-PL1 versus Sony NEX3 review?

 

This is another of my reviews of two or three-generation old camera equipment.  It is relevant for frugal people and, perhaps, for those curious as to whether technology actually leaps ahead as rapidly as manufacturers and technophiles would have us believe.

 

As of this writing, Olympus is still using the micro-four-thirds sensor that occupied its E-PL1.  That means that instead of buying the companies’ newer cameras (like the E-PL3 and E-P3), one can save a good deal of money by buying the E-PL1, without giving anything up in picture quality.

 

BUT — whether to buy the E-PL1 over Sony’s NEX or Samsung’s NX larger sensor models is another question.

 

I did not find illuminating answers to this question on the Internet.  Most reviewers had either not used both cameras, or they had not used them at the same time for the same purposes.

 

 

What Internet reviewers said was not especially helpful, either in regard to these specific models or as to the virtues of the two different sensor sizes

 

The Internet consensus seems to be that the APS-C sized sensor in Sony’s NEX cameras is superior to mirco-four-thirds, especially when it comes to delivering comparatively low noise levels.

 

However, according to these same reviewers, the Sony NEX system initially had only three allegedly “crappy” lenses, all of which failed the sensor’s virtues.  In comparison, they said, Olympus and Panasonic micro- four-thirds cameras had access to a significant number of very good to excellent lenses.

 

Reviewers generally left readers to guess which way the real world balance fell.  How did (a) bad to mediocre lenses on a good sensor compare to (b) good to excellent lenses on a comparatively small and noisy sensor?

 

Since reviews left me hanging, I bought both models at close-out prices to see what I thought.

 

 

I used both cameras side by side, every day for four weeks, for identical subjects in identical light

 

This was not a scientific test.  I choose equipment based on how it works under the conditions and at the settings, where I typically use it.  My perspective parallels Michael Reichmann’s practically-minded bent at The Luminous Landscape.

 

Note

 

The only reviews that I pay significant attention to are those from professionals or from people who might as well be professionals.

 

Most everybody else tends to get side-tracked by irrelevant or unimportant issues, often simply because these can be measured.  Sensor noise is a good example.  So are minute differences in side-by-side pictures from competing cameras that photo forum participants spend millions of, often heated, words arguing about.

 

 

These two cameras say something non-obvious about their respective sensor sizes

 

For me, a surprising discovery was that the E-PL1 kept up with NEX3 in practical picture quality for the uses most people would put them to.  (People who are more demanding won’t be using either of these cameras.)

 

This equality is something that most of the reviews that I read did not explicitly mention.

 

 

Olympus’ sharpness versus Sony’s smoothness

 

What I saw in E-PL1’s results was identical to what I had previously seen with Olympus’ four-thirds models, the E-30 and E-5.  Olympus’ pixel density apparently produces a granularity in pictures that aids resolution.

 

In everyday use, the E-Pl1 was slightly, but noticeably and consistently, sharper than the NEX3.  I do not think this was the result of diminished quality in the Sony’s E-mount 18-55mm image-stabilized lens.

 

I say this because I have a lot of experience with the Sony a500 dSLR (reviewed here).  Its sensor produces the same smooth, but slightly “soft” results that the NEX does, even when using optically excellent lenses.

 

The same slightly creamy characteristic appears to have been carried through to Sony’s newer cameras, the a580, a55, a77, and NEX5n.  (I haven’t seen enough of the NEX7 to say anything about it.)

 

The two manufacturers have taken different approaches to tonality and resolution.  Objectively speaking, I cannot say that one is superior to the other.  But Olympus’ decision to concentrate on getting more detail out of its smaller sensor enables it, in my opinion, to compete on equal terms with the NEX3 in day-to-day use.

 

 

Subjective statements regarding Olympus’ visual punch versus Sony’s more relaxed renditions

 

Olympus and Sony take different approaches to rendering color and tonality.

 

Note

 

What follows is subjective.  My abbreviated medical training in neuroscience, combined with life experience, convinces me that people’s brains operated differently in regard to color perception (and many other things).

 

Some people can discriminate variations in color that others simply don’t see.  Close parallels are our varying abilities in discriminating smell and sound.

 

I’m sensitive to color.  Part of my love affair with 8x10 view cameras was an effort to capture the color nuances I regularly saw around me.  I failed.  Even today, I know of no photographic system that can match the physical world’s array of subtle colors.

 

Olympus aficionados seem to love the cameras’ consistently punchy and chromatically “compressed” color renditions, whether jpeg or RAW.  There is a zap in most of Olympus pictures that goes further toward graphic arts representations than I normally like.

 

These differences are difficult to put into words.  But I can give an example.  The room that I write in overlooks a micro-forest of pine trees, fronted by variously colored plants, gravel, and grasses.

 

The pines are genetically different from each other.  Needle colors vary slightly from one tree to the next and even by branches within each.

 

Photographing these with the E-PL1 gives me a relatively uniform dark green (no matter the exposure) that my eyes do not see.

 

Sony’s NEX3 and a500 deliver a slight, but noticeably increased variegated series of greens and yellow tinges that are slightly closer to what my brain sees in the trees.  The same is true for most of the other plant colors in the scene.

 

Olympus’ visual zing seems to come from compressing chromaticity and tonality in an eye-catching way.  Olympus seems (to me) to “distill” color essences down to “blocks” for visual impact.  Sony, on the other hand, seems to prefer a less “graphic arts” approach.

 

For subjective reasons, I slightly prefer Sony’s interpretation.  It looks more realistic.  Which, of course, when it comes to art may not be a good thing.

 

 

Post-processing differences between the two cameras

 

Like professional photographer Marc Williams — who wrote here about the Sony a900 as a wedding camera — I think Sony consistently delivers RAW color that needs the least post-processing of any competing manufacturer.

 

As compared to NEX files, he E-PL1’s pictures took literally four times as long to process to acceptability.  That so, whether I used Olympus’ own RAW-processing software or DXO’s Optics Pro 6.

 

On the positive side, the E-PL1’s output required much less sharpening.  And, also occasionally useful, Olympus pictures’ “granularity” gave post-processing software something to grip, when I wanted to modify their appearance for artistic effect.

 

In comparison, the Sony’s output was what many people might consider too blandly smooth.

 

 

The noise gremlin — not the huge difference other reviewers would have us believe

 

Noise concerns are overblown in camera reviews these days.  It is certainly true that the E-PL1’s sensor is noisy.  And I had to noise process every frame.  But even after doing so, the Olympus’ output in decent lighting was still sharper than the Sony’s.

 

In subdued lighting and in contrasty outdoor lighting, the E-PL1 runs into noise problems with shadows before the Sony does.

 

But this criticism is not a blanket one.  Sony’s noise reduction, which can’t be turned off (even in RAW), makes a water-color mess, whenever significant noise is present.  The E-PL1 retains detail a bit longer, which makes the race between the cameras less one-sided than many reviewers would have us think.

 

For me, ISO 1250 was the E-PL1’s practical limit.  The Sony could go to 1600, after which its noise-erasing algorithm begins to make a watery mess of things.  (I prefer noise to watercolor dreaminess.)

 

In practical use I did not see that much difference between the cameras’ outputs, provided that I was willing to noise process almost every Olympus frame.

 

 

A difference that did matter, sort of — flash — but to both manufacturers’ advantage

 

This comparison boils down to anticipating how much flash power one is eventually going to need.

 

The E-PL1’s in-camera flash is good only for fill.  It is practically worthless for anything else.

 

The Sony’s tiny external (kit-included) flash is sufficient to effectively light portions of dimly lit rooms.  It runs circles around the Olympus in-camera unit.

 

However, if one steps up one’s flash needs, Olympus comes out ahead.  The E-PL1 provides a hot-shoe that allows mounting external flashes and flash-triggering radio remotes.  The Sony does not, except insofar as it's a proprietary NEX unit.  Which, in my estimation, makes the E-PL1 much more of photographer’s camera than the NEX.

 

For example, I found that the E-PL1 hot-shoe works perfectly with Paul C. Buff CyberSynchs (and, presumably any other radio controller). This allows  the E-PL1 to trigger multiple non-Olympus flashes or studio strobes.  A handy feature for real estate professionals or portraitists.

 

 

User interface — not the big difference that other reviewers led me to anticipate

 

Most NEX reviewers seem to think that one will either love or hate the NEX, based largely on its point-and-shoot interface.  That wasn’t true for me.

 

Certainly, the NEX menus are time-consuming, if one makes frequent changes to camera settings.  Essentially, one has to hit the unlabeled “menu” button and move the cursor (via a toggle button and dial) to one of six icons, and then move through the menu and sub-menus that pop up.

 

For dSLR users, this can be frustratingly obtuse — especially since the single most important menu has rarely used settings listed earlier in the sequence than more used ones.  The NEX3 has no way to customize this order, so one has to go through the same ramble time after time.

 

BUT, this characteristic is no different than a point-and-shoot.  And it is not difficult to memorize where everything is.  If one uses Program or Aperture-Preferred Modes, the camera works relatively efficiently.  So while I don’t love the NEX, neither do I hate it.  It works well enough for what it is.  Which is a glorified point-and-shoot with manual overrides.

 

Similarly, the E-PL1’s more sophisticated menus and controls are not as good in practice as reviews led me to think.  Part of the problem is that, although Olympus makes menus easier to get to, it still takes too many button pushes.  Occasionally, I got lost in the Olympus’ menu and button-pushing structure in a way that the NEX never misled me into doing.

 

In practice, I found that I could use both cameras to do what I wanted.  I liked the E-PL1’s controls better, but Sony did a noticeably superior job of taking pictures without fiddling.

 

 

Sony edged ahead in the “fiddle factor” race

 

The NEX’s metering works better than the E-PL1’s.

 

I had to change exposure compensation much more frequently and more dramatically on the Olympus.

 

This characteristic eliminated the E-PL1’s menus advantage.  What’s the point of adding more directly accessible controls, if the user is going to have to access them more often, due to deficiencies in the camera’s picture-taking algorithms?

 

 

Legacy lenses — Sony’s “peaking” function on the NEX3 is not what it’s cracked up to be

 

Many reviewers give the NEX the advantage in focusing legacy (film) lenses, due to its “peaking” function.  Peaking marks in-focus portions of the picture with a color, which the user can choose from the applicable menu.

 

Note

 

Peaking came with firmware version 4 for the original NEX cameras, and it is included with the NEX-C3 and NEX5n and later models.

 

In practice, peaking works well only when the camera would have been able to auto-focus in the first place.  So in dim conditions, where one is most likely to need it, it doesn’t work at all.

 

Peaking also worked only erratically for me with the two Olympus OM lenses I tested it with.  It seems to require high contrast edges to work reasonably well.  And, even then, it has a tendency to show in-focus conditions through too wide a depth-of-field range.  This means that, especially with telephotos, something you thought was properly focused is not.

 

Peaking on the NEX3 amounts to a less than reliable gimmick.

 

Surprisingly, given Internet reviews, I found that the E-PL1 did just as well as the NEX with legacy lenses.  I simply used the camera’s magnifier button (which the NEX also has).  Even with the E-Pl1’s dimmer, lower pixel count LCD, focusing legacy lenses worked reasonably well.

 

Peculiarly, I found that I could focus legacy lenses on distant Christmas lights at night much more easily with the E-PL1 than the NEX3.  There was something blur-inducing about the NEX’s LCD at night that made this task far more difficult than it needed to be.

 

On balance, the two camera bodies perform identically with legacy lenses.

 

 

Overall — these two cameras are pretty equal

 

By this time in this review, I imagine the reader is getting the impression that for every advantage one of these cameras has over the other, it dribbles it away with some equalizing bit of ineptitude.

 

In day to day use, the E-PL1 and NEX3 are surprisingly good at what they were apparently designed to do.  Of course, auto-focusing under challenging conditions defeats both.  And neither is competent enough to replace a digital SLR for the breadth of work most “serious” photographers generally like to do.

 

Therefore, the question is whether either camera crosses the subjective threshold that willingly accepts small size at the price of reduced versatility.

 

Note

 

“Subjective threshold” is a concept that I defined in the E-PL1 review.

 

That review highlighted the E-PL1’s deficiencies under the conditions where I was most likely to use it.  Dim interior light.

 

The NEX3 suffered similar shortcomings.  It made them worse by pretending to find focus, when it hadn’t.  I preferred the E-PL1’s more honest admission that it couldn’t lock onto anything.

 

 

Recommendation — both or neither (repeating what I said at the beginning of this review)

 

For me, these cameras worked equally well, but probably not enough better than a point and shoot to be worth the hassle of their considerably larger bulk.

 

At the other end of the size spectrum, neither is enough smaller than a small dSLR to make up for their obvious deficiencies under challenging photographic conditions (dim light and action).

 

But for those who find them a nice compromise under more tolerant photographic conditions, I would suggest the following guidelines to choosing between them and the competing systems to which they belong:

 

Sony NEX3

 

If you need a flash, but don’t want to carry a large external flash, choose the NEX.

 

If you do a lot dimly lit indoor photography and refuse to noise process, choose the NEX.

 

If you intend to use a camera mostly on automatic, choose the NEX.

 

If you want to minimize post-processing, choose the NEX.

 

If you want to get the equivalent of a 24mm wide-angle lens (which means 16mm on the NEX and 12mm on the E-PL1), without spending a fortune, choose the NEX.

 

If you are partial tilting LCD screens, choose the NEX.

 

Olympus E-PL1

 

If you need a hot-shoe, so that you can add a competent external flash or a flash-controlling radio remote to the camera, choose the E-PL1.

 

If you have a size threshold that insists that your camera and its zoom lens fit reasonably easily in an average sized jacket pocket, choose the E-PL1 with its collapsible kit lens.

 

If you are rabidly averse to point-and-shoot menus, choose the E-PL1.

 

If you need a reasonably complete lens system today, and are confident that Sony and Samsung are not soon going to eat the smaller micro-four-thirds sensor for lunch, choose the E-PL1.

 

In all other respects, these two cameras are equally capable and equally easy to use in the real world.