Olympus E-P1 High-ISO RAW

Olympus E-P1 High-ISO RAW Comparison With The Olympus E-30

Test setup:

The E-P1 used was a presentation model with firmware level 1.0, said to be pre-production.

Both cameras were shot with the Olympus Zuiko Digital 50mm 1:2 Macro, hand-held and not avoiding blur, so sharpness is not something to be judged here. Exposure values were not completely equal either, so the results have to be taken with a grain of salt.

The E-P1's RAW file was patched to identify the camera as the E-30, too, in order to make the RAW converter accept the file and force it to use the same profile as for the E-30.

Both RAW files were then developed with Silkypix Developer Studio 3 using default parameters except for 'Sharpness' (35/80/90/Pure detail), 'Noise reduction', which was completely turned off (0/0/0/0/0), and 'Demosaic sharp' (50). The RAW files were developed to TIFF and crops were taken and saved as minimally compressed JPEGs.

The complete field of fiew:

The crops:

ISO

E-P1

E-30

800

1600

3200

6400

Conclusion: Looks like the E-P1 sensor has perhaps something like 1/2, maybe 2/3 EV stops lower noise than the E-30 sensor, which is a significant improvement. The images show that the high ISO improvements which can be seen in the JPEG are not completely related to the new JPEG engine, but at least partially go back to an improved sensor.

RS 01-Jul-09