Olympus E-3: Miscellanea

By Eamon Hickey

I mentioned in my earlier post related to the E-3's autofocus system that Olympus has had to do some rapid catching up on certain areas of SLR technology that emerged in the 1990s when the company was concentrating almost completely on point-and-shoots. Wireless TTL off-camera flash is another of those technologies, and the E-3 marks the debut of Olympus's version of this feature. (The new E-420 and E-520 also support it.) I didn't give the system a complete test, but I've got a few comments.

Olympus's system uses visible light from the E-3's built-in flash to control all of the flashes in your setup, as opposed to infrared signals, which are used in the Nikon and Canon wireless off-camera systems. In all of these systems, there is a line of sight issue: the slave flashes must be able to "see" the master controller (which is normally at camera position) and the control signals, whether infrared or visible, must be detectable against the ambient light in your environment in order for it all to work.

With the E-3's system, you can in theory control any number of off-camera flashes in three separate groups, and you can vary the lighting ratios of each group, just as you can with other similar systems. I found it easy to set up and use; it's a simple and very quick matter to turn a flash on or off, or increase or decrease its light output, all from the camera. I shot in a studio setting, and in that environment the system was not very persnickety about maintaining a clear line of sight. I used both an FL-50R and an FL-36R, and they were often behind umbrellas, or sharply to the side of the camera, and probably outside the permissible coverage angle of the controller (i.e. the built-in flash). Everything still worked well nearly all the time, and I was able to shoot pretty freely without a lot of fiddling and re-positioning.

Three shots of Luda, a photographer friend of mine, and her amazing cat, Bizet. Main light is the FL-50R through an umbrella, and the sequence shows, from left to right, no background flash, a background flash (FL-36R) on the floor set for about "+1" exposure compensation, and finally the background flash set for about "+2" exposure comp. All controlled TTL from the camera.
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In TTL mode, I got some modest exposure variation from shot-to-shot, but this is not unusual for wireless off-camera flash exposure systems. You can forego TTL exposure control and use the system to manually set the output of your slave flashes, still from camera position, which is how I would use it in real life if I owned an E-3. The convenience of being able to adjust your flashes individually from the camera is actually really nice. For the relatively simple environmental portraits that I sometimes shoot, where I often use two flashes off-camera, I'd be happy to have this capability, and I'm confident it would work well. I did not get a chance to test it outdoors, however, so I can't comment on how it's affected by strong sunlight, or how it would perform in very large rooms and more fluid scenarios like you'd encounter shooting a wedding reception dance floor, for example. One note: on a couple of close-up product test shots (at a distance of about three feet) I did notice that the control signals from the built-in flash were actually contributing a bit to the exposure, which I didn't want. I'd have to gobo the built-in flash for any close-up images I actually cared about.

Luda does a lot of self-portraits with wigs, props, and whatnot and, though I did not set out to make a kind of sex-bomb kitsch shot, it happened anyway. Lighting is the FL-50R and the FL-36R on each side of her, through umbrellas, controlled TTL with negative exposure compensation. The blue background is a gelled Nikon SB-26 on manual output.

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Switching gears entirely (thus this post's title), I'll briefly outline my prejudices related to image quality—on the E-3 and otherwise. I'm not going to give an exhaustive pixel-level analysis of the E-3's files here. My approach to image quality is to determine what's technically sufficient for me based on my enlargement goals and what I like to shoot and then stop worrying about the files and start worrying about the content of the pictures. In my case that's a practical enlargement limit of 13x19 inches or so (or, possibly, magazine double-truck), and I shoot general subjects with an emphasis on people pictures.

The E-3's files are more than fine for me. In areas such as detail resolution, tonality, dynamic range, artifacting, elasticity (i.e. torturing them in Photoshop), and the like, there's nothing significantly out of the ordinary—in either direction, better or worse—for a 10-megapixel, large-sensor camera in the files I shot with the E-3. If ten megapixels will do what you want to do, the E-3 should work just fine. The one exception that I can see to that is if you need to shoot a lot at high ISO settings. The E-3 is not bad at all at ISO 1600 or even 3200, but if I shot a lot of indoor sports or was working on a documentary project about nightclubbing in the big city, I'd choose a different camera, a few of which are significantly cleaner at high ISO. (Note that the issue with high ISO noise is not that it renders images unusable; it just limits how much they can be enlarged. I don't shoot all that much at ISOs above 800, so if I have to settle for a somewhat smaller print on the few good shots I do make at high ISOs, it's not the end of the world for me.)

Please note that I am not arguing that small nuances of image file quality shouldn't matter to anyone. For some photographers, if Camera A makes files that are 5% better than Camera B, that might be a very legitimate reason to buy Camera A, and I have no quarrel with that. If I were trying to sell 40x60-inch fine art landscape prints, I'd be saving up for a 16 or 20-megapixel camera and minutely scrutinizing every pixel of its output, probably with a Schneider loupe pressed against the glass of my monitor. But my interests are different, and for me it's a matter of sufficient quality, not small degrees of comparative superiority, so you're not going to get that level of granular file analysis in my cockamamie musings on the E-3. Glad we settled that.

Luda lit with the FL-50R at camera right in an umbrella, on "1/16th" power manual output set from the camera, and a touch of fill from the FL-36R at "1/80th" manual output. Very convenient to try multiple test shots at different power levels without having to leave my sitting position on the floor.

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Eamon

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Olympus E-3 at Amazon U.S.
Olympus E-3 at B&H Photo

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Olympus E-3 Review Part 1 (preface)
Olympus E-3 Review Part 2 (first impressions)
Olympus E-3 Review Part 3 (lenses and autofocus)
Olympus E-3 Review Part 4 (live view)
Olympus E-3 Review Part 5 (miscellanea)
Olympus E-3 Review Part 6 (conclusion)

Comments

[Len]

Dear Eamon & Mike,

What a great series of reviews of the E-3, so refreshing after reading so many that just rewrite the press release or interpret the specifications. I am looking forward to your overall conclusions, assuming they are coming.

Many thanks, please keep up these great reviews. Oh and your list of top ten cameras, outstanding work... they make such interesting snapshots of the state of the nation.... And hey, they are pretty influential... On saturday I had to go and play with one of these in the camera shop, just to see how it felt in my hand, and how nice it was to look through the viewfinder. Thanks for helping me to make up my mind on this camera.

Len

[Peter Hovmand]

Well, what a nice flash system - and what an effective girl :)

[Adam Maas]

The Nikon and Canon systems (as well as the Sony/Minolta system and Pentax systems) only use IR to control the flashes if you have the IR controller widget (or an Nikon SG-3IR Panel with the popup flash on Nikon or Pentax).

When you use the popup on Nikon, Sony/Minolta and Pentax systems, or a flash unit as Master they use visible light for control like the Oly system.

You can likely use Nikon's SG-3IR panel to mask the visible portion of the popup's controller flashes on the Oly's, it fits in the standard ISO shoe and has a flip-down panel to block all but IR. This works on Nikon and Pentax cameras (it doesn't mount on Sony/Minolta's and Canon's popup's are crippled and don't offer wireless flash control).

[Eamon Hickey]

"You can likely use Nikon's SG-3IR panel to mask the visible portion of the popup's controller flashes on the Oly's, it fits in the standard ISO shoe and has a flip-down panel to block all but IR."

Hi Adam,

Thanks for the deeper explanation of the various wireless off-camera flash permutations; I was unaware of that Nikon panel. If your suggestion works without too much limitation, it would indeed solve any issues with unwanted visible light affecting the exposure (obviously the purpose for which Nikon makes it.) Although, again, I should say that it was a very minor concern of mine to begin with; I wasn't really finding fault with Olympus over it.

Besides not going too deeply into the various ways of controlling all the different systems, I also didn't note that Olympus does not offer any form of separate shoe-mounted controller (as Nikon/Canon do)-- i.e. the built-in flash is currently the only controller for Olympus's system. I've seen some people criticize that, but I didn't see it as a real drawback. Maybe I should?

[Stephen S.]

Another way to block all but the IR from the built-in flash is to tape a piece of fully exposed, developed film to the flash. A left-over piece of leader works well.

[Shadzee]

Adam,

On both Pentax K10D and K20D you can completely turn off the visible flash output (via menus) for wireless control of off-camera flashes (af540 & af360). Although the on-camera flash has to be up, but it will NOT contribute ANY additional light to the exposure.

[Adam Maas]

@Eamon: The lack of a IR controller is a small issue. Typically the IR controller has about twice the range as compared to using a master flash, and also (big issue for Canon users) it costs half of what a top-end flash costs. Note there is a Minolta IR controller available used, but it doesn't support any of the newer features of the always evolving Sony/Minolta flash system (Forget ADI, higher sync or the newly announced multi-group flash). Unless the range is an issue, this isn't too big a problem unless you have a Canon or a lower-end or top-end Nikon or a lower-end Pentax which can't control via the popup. As all Olympus bodies which support wireless flash can control via the popup (ditto Sony/Minolta) this is much less of an issue than it is for Pentax users who don't have such a widget but do have cameras which can't control via the popup. Thankfully for Pentaxians, the AF360FGZ flash, which costs about the same as those IR controller widgets, can command wireless flashes.

@Shadzee: That is incorrect, you can set the K10D and K20D to only emit preflashes and not contribute to the exposure, but even when doing so you are still using visible light preflashes to control the flash, which can result in bleed into the exposure in some cases (the last preflash is concurrent with the start of exposure for sync purposes). You need an IR filter of some sort to block all visible light.

[AndrewG NY]

@Shadzee, I concur with Adam--the K10D built-in flash does emit visible light even if used only as a controller. It doesn't contribute greatly to most exposures but sometimes you may get an unwanted reflection. I'm pretty sure that using a AF-360FGZ or AF-540FGZ as a controller doesn't help except that you can tilt/swivel the head to bounce the control flashes away from your subject. I may look and see if I can find some sort of filter for this--I've been reading that unexposed-but-processed slide film can work.