Tullio
New member
One thing I'm not not too happy about the E-P1 is the ISO behavior. AUTO ISO is kept at 200 and at this ISO, images are very noisy compared to the G1. So, I decided to play with ISO 100, 125 and 160. Indeed, the images are much brighter at these ISO levels and highlights are often clipped. The interesting thing though was the fact that things appear to be worse at ISO 125 and 160 than 100. So, I decided to focus on ISO 100, trying to get the E-P1 not to clip highlights as much. After taking a good 150 shots at various combinations, I think I managed to get the E-P1 to behave very close between ISO 100 and the default 200. I settled on the following settings:
I set picture mode to Natural, with Contrast -2, Sharpness +1 and Saturation -1. Noise filter set to LOW, Gradation to AUTO and Exposure to -0.3. I saved this configuration in one of "My mode" and have the Fn button set to My Mode. Now I can easily toggle between the normal setting (which is very similar except for the contrast which I have set to -1 instead of -2 and of course ISO set to AUTO) and My Mode. I find that the combination of setting Contrast to -2 and reducing the exposure by -0.3 almost totally offsets the E-P1's tendency to over expose at low ISOs. As a result, I can now benefit from ISO 100 and get much cleaner images. I'm happy!
I set picture mode to Natural, with Contrast -2, Sharpness +1 and Saturation -1. Noise filter set to LOW, Gradation to AUTO and Exposure to -0.3. I saved this configuration in one of "My mode" and have the Fn button set to My Mode. Now I can easily toggle between the normal setting (which is very similar except for the contrast which I have set to -1 instead of -2 and of course ISO set to AUTO) and My Mode. I find that the combination of setting Contrast to -2 and reducing the exposure by -0.3 almost totally offsets the E-P1's tendency to over expose at low ISOs. As a result, I can now benefit from ISO 100 and get much cleaner images. I'm happy!