Olympus E-30 Review

The Olympus E-30 is a very good digital SLR, and arguably one of the best they've ever made. It offers very good photo quality, image stabilization, generally snappy performance, live view on a rotating 2.7" LCD display, plenty of manual controls, and built-in support for wireless flashes. Other nice touches include a built-in level and pitch meter, the ability to preview different exposure and white balance settings, and yes, even the art filters are kind of fun. The biggest problems I have with the E-30 are 1) its price and 2) its tendency to clip highlights. Aside from those issues, there's very little to complain about. If you don't mind paying $1300 for it, then the Olympus E-30 is a D-SLR that I can easily recommend.

The E-30 has a lot in common with its big brother, the E-3. The E-30 has a smaller and lighter body (but it's by no means compact) and no weather sealing, but it retains the rotating LCD of the E-3. The camera has a metal/plastic chassis on the inside, and a sturdy composite shell on the outside. It's quite solid, with even the often flimsy plastic doors feeling sturdy. The camera has a good-sized right hand grip, and the rubberized surface gives it a secure feel. Like all of Olympus' E-series cameras, the E-30 has a FourThirds lens mount, with a 2X focal length conversion ratio. It also features sensor-shift image stabilization, which means that every lens you attach will have shake reduction. Another traditional Olympus feature is the Supersonic Wave Filter, which helps to keep dust off of the Live MOS sensor. There are three ways to connect an external flash to the E-30: hot shoe, flash sync port, or wirelessly.

On the back of the camera you'll find a 2.7" LCD that can flip to the side and rotate a total of 270 degrees. The screen has 230,000 pixels -- less than some of the competition -- but it's good enough for most purposes. In addition to performs its menu navigation and image playback duties, the LCD can also be used for live view. Live view has its good points: you can see exactly how your photo will turn out, white balance and exposure can be previewed, face detection is available, and manual focusing is a breeze. At the same time, the contrast detect AF is quite slow, and the other two focus modes introduce some shutter lag. As a result, I've found that live view is a poor choice for shooting anything in motion. I can say that the LCD is easy to see outdoors, movement is very fluid (if you turn on the high speed LV feature), and you can see fairly well in low light (with LV boost on). Don't want to use live view? Then you can use the E-30's optical viewfinder, which has a magnification of 1.02X. While that's large for a FourThirds camera, it's still on the small side compared to other midrange D-SLRs.

Jeff Keller

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