Hi all, well my E520 arrived this evening and i set up the test on the same dusty exercise machine with the same lighting and setting the camera to the same settings. Perfect :thumbup::thumbup: It focused very quickly, no hunting and locked onto the red square i was aiming at. I ran through the focal lengths indicated on the lenses for both the viewfinder and in live view and the results were identicle.
I am a happy man again. Also the 14-42mm lens has been repaired. The strange thing is, i would of thought that Olympus would have some kind of professional focus alignment chart but they sent a copy of photos taken with the focus chart they used and it was the downloadable chart from Tim Jackson. (
http://focustestchart.com/chart.html) guess it must be a good chart if Olympus use it to confirm alignment. Well done Tim :clap:
Still not sure what i want. The E30 is very high on my interest list but now i have decided that IF i do go ahead and stay with Olympus, i want the 12-60mm lens, adding this puts the camera up in the same price bracket as the D7000.
BUT, something i have learned over the last couple of weeks is that it is all well and good having a fantastic all singing all dancing camera, but if you couple it to slow average lenses (ie, not pro grade) then all the resolution that the camera can capture will not be utilised and you still end up with soft images. So im more interested in the E30 as 12MP is enough for me, i dont print my pics and if im honest i only do some low light stuff as im more into flash (strobist) lighting and dont really need extreme ISO's.
The pics i have seen from E30's at 3200 ISO are reasonably good and if you run them through noise ninja they can (if the lighting/exposure was correct) look perfectly acceptable. Good lenses from Nikon cost a fortune, but some really good lenses from Olympus are reasonable and within my price range. (not my wifes though, still trying to work out how to get around that)
So i need to keep selling things and saving and then nip down to a camera shop (wife in tow as she speaks the language) and have a look at both cameras.
Im glad my camera was ok and back in time for xmas. We have had about a metre of snow here in the last few days so i want to try and get some time to capture some winter pics.
Thanks to everyone for their thoughts and advice, this forum is a great place to get help and insperation from and im glad i can be a small part of it.
100% Crops of Pics of focus as it is now.
Thanks again
J :salute: