Description
The Olympus E-PL5 is the successor to the E-PL3 and is targeted at enthusiasts and consumers that want more power than their point and shoot may give, but also want better image quality. Conversely, the E-PL5 was also designed with a unique crowd of shooters in mind.
There is much to like about the Olympus E-PL5 besides the image quality though; it is a small and lightweight camera that is comfortable in the hands, though it could have been a tad larger for optimal comfort.
The autofocus is an upgrade of Olympus’s F.A.S.T. autofocus system that takes advantages of the company’s MSC lenses to deliver some of the fastest autofocus performance that we’ve seen so far from a camera in this class.
The camera can shoot JPEGs, RAWs, or both if they want. To shoot these, the user can take advantage of the 3 inch 460K dot touchscreen. This screen enables touch to shoot, touch to focus, or can be disabled from shooting. In playback mode, one can think of it almost like an Android device in terms of flipping through images, zooming in on them, etc.
Build and Design
The E-PL5 retains a very high end point-and-shoot-eqsue style of camera body but adds a touch of retro appeal to its exterior. It makes maximum use of the real estate by including direct control buttons where it can but without adding too many to overwhelm the user. It comes in many colors, but we used the Silver version; which reminded us a little bit of silver editions of old SLR and Rangefinder cameras.
The E-PL5’s three inch touchscreen is the primary display for users to focus, compose, and operate the camera, though there are two different electronic viewfinders available if the user chooses to go that route. No matter what the lighting conditions were, the screen often had enough resolution for composing and viewing images despite being only 460K.