Vintage digital – the Olympus E-1

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The Olympus E-1 was introduced in 2003, the first interchangeable lens camera designed specifically from the ground up to be digital. It would provide the beginning for what would become the “E-System”, containing the 4/3″, or “Four Thirds” sensor. The camera contained a 5-megapixel CCD sensor from Kodak. The 4/3″ sensor had a size of 17.3mm×13.0mm. The size of the film was akin to that of 110 film, with an aspect ratio of 3:2, which breaks from the traditional 35mm 4:3 format.

The E-1 had a magnesium-alloy body, which was solid, dense, and built like a proverbial tank. The camera is also weather-sealed, and offered a feature many through was revolutionary – a “Supersonic Wave Filter”, to clean off the dust on the imaging sensor. From a digital perspective, Olympus designed a lens mount that was wide in relation to the sensor or image-circle diagonal. This enabled the design of lenses to be such that they minimized the angle of light-ray incidence into the corners of the frame. Instead of starting from scratch, Canon, Konica-Minolta, Nikon and Pentax just took their film SLR mounts and installed smaller sensors in bodies based on their film models. The lens system was also designed from scratch.

The tank in guise of a camera

The E-1, with its sensor smaller that the APS-C already available had both pros and cons. A smaller sensor meant lenses could be both physically smaller and lighter. A 50mm lens would be about the same size as other 50mm lenses, but with the crop-factor, it would actually be a 100mm lens. 4/3rd’s was an incredibly good system for telephoto’s because they were half the size and shape than their full-frame counterparts.

Although quite an innovative camera, it never really seemed to take off in a professional sense. It didn’t have continuous shooting or even the auto-focus speed needed for genres like sports photography. It also fell short on the megapixel side of things, as the Canon EOS-1Ds with its full-frame 11-magapixel sensor had already appeared in 2002. A year later in 2004, the Olympus E-300 had already bypassed the 5MP with 8MP, making the E-1 somewhat obsolete from a resolution viewpoint. The E-1’s photosite pitch was also smaller than most of its APS-C rivals sporting 6MP sensors.

Further Reading

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