New perspectives
One of the things people love about PEN cameras is the way they make it easy to take high-class pictures, even if you don’t know much about photography. Thanks to some the latest high-tech innovations, the PEN Lite takes that user-friendliness to a whole new level. It’s the very first PEN with a tiltable LCD that makes seemingly impossible shots a piece of cake. By pulling out and angling the 3-inch display, you can comfortably frame and capture unusual perspectives, even with the camera at arm’s length. For example, if you need to shoot over the heads of a crowd or focus on an insect by your ankles without bending down.
Easier settings
To make the most of excellent optics and to get the very best shots, camera settings need to be spot on. For an amateur, that’s often a challenge that ends in frustration. Not with the Lite, and Live Guide is the key. Live Guide lets you easily master the settings that make all the difference –motion and background blur, colour intensity, lighting mood and brightness. In a typical shooting situation, the Live Guide helps blur out the background to make a shot more dramatic and show off the foreground to the best effect. To achieve this, you’d normally have to adjust the depth of field using the lens or menu, but with Live Guide you just press a dial to move a bar up and down until you see the shot you want on the LCD. The Lite chooses the right settings automatically. Adjusting more permanent settings in the menu is simpler too, now that each menu choice has a pop-up window with a description of how it works. And for other menu settings that need adjusting more regularly, Olympus have fitted a row of fast-access buttons – on the top of the camera right next to the shutter release.
Faster focusing
When you purchase a PEN Lite, you can be confident you’re taking home cutting-edge technology. And that means fantastic still and movie quality. Like the other two new PEN cameras, the E-PL3 is powered by the new Olympus TruePic VI image engine. TruePic VI makes the camera faster and more responsive all-round, but the speed of the autofocus is amazing. FAST AF is the world’s fastest* autofocus system. An AF of this speed gives you every chance of capturing even the most spontaneous, fast-moving shots. And with 35 separate focus points spread over nearly the whole sensor, it’s even possible to focus on objects tucked away in the corners of the display. Thanks to AF Illuminator, low-light focussing is better than ever and new AF tracking technology ensures subjects stay sharp even when they move in and out of the frame. And all this in the blink of an eye, because Full Time AF means the AF is always on – and the main subject already in focus.