Wherein I walk with the Olympus Pen E-PL2

The Olympus Pen E-PL2 was released in 2011 as a successor to the E-PL1, which was itself a stripped down supplement to the Olympus Pen E-P lineup of cameras. 2011 was 15 years ago. I was three years out of high school and working at an auto detail shop while pursuing what would become a useless community college degree. That was a long time ago. The camera is by any measure an antiquated device. It has a 12 megapixel M43 sensor, which is hilarious in our current world of 60-something megapixel full frame sensors. On paper it’s a camera that doesn’t really make any sense to have in the rotation in 2026. But here we are.

I like small cameras, and generally dislike lugging around a large camera when a little camera can do the job. I have a friend who can obstinately lug around a Pentax 67 the way I’ll carry around a pocket camera but I’m not built like that. I’m more likely to take a camera with me if it’s not a burden to carry. As a result I’d been mulling over a pocketable camera that I could easily slip in to a feedbag on the bike for bike rides or something that was at least lighter than my old Canon DSLRs to lug around through the hills. The Leicas are nicer to carry but I’ve been less enthused about shooting them lately. I also didn’t want to spend a lot of money on this little venture, and this is when I learned that the compact camera market is kind of a hot mess. It feels like it has been almost entirely “gentrified” by YouTubers who have made videos about certain cameras and pushed the values through the roof (there’s also a weird filmic nostalgia with a lot of these cameras that makes them coveted as well) on what should otherwise be highly depreciated consumer electronics. But there are some gems you can still find for under a couple hundred dollars. The Olympus E-P, E-PM and E-PL lineups are some of those, especially the older ones. Some of the Panasonic M43 stuff is good as well. After a lot of camera research and eBay searching I was able to get my E-PL2 for $140 with the 14-42mm kit zoom, which I was happy with.

But how is this 15 year old digital camera in actual practice? Well, for the most part it’s pretty solid. And not just figuratively, it’s all metal construction makes it feel literally solid. Specs wise, like I said before, it’s got a little 12 megapixel M43 sensor and can take any one of the huge number of M43 lenses. Again, that sounds ridiculous in our contemporary environment but we’re well past the point of diminishing returns in the megapixel race. 12MP is perfectly fine for 99% of us. There is no viewfinder, so composing is done by looking at the 460,000 dot LCD screen, which has a decidedly “retro” or “lo-fi” feeling to it. There are viewfinders that you can attach to the camera, both an optical and electronic. I have an optical viewfinder coming that is meant to pair with the matching Olympus 17mm lenses (34mm equivalent in FF terms) in case I get sick of composing on the back of the screen. It is definitely a bit of a struggle for me to fight the muscle memory of wanting a viewfinder of some kind when I go to make a photograph but there is also something fun about just composing on the back of the camera, especially with the lo-fi screen that just vaguely hints at what your picture will be.

And as far as the pictures go, they’re surprisingly good! In some ways this shouldn’t surprise me that much. After all I do regularly shoot a Canon 5D Mk1 which is also a 12.7MP camera and I’ve never really found that camera to be lacking in detail or resolution for, again, 99% of reasonable purposes. One of the other things I’ve always enjoyed about the M43 format is that it shoots 4:3 natively as opposed to 3:2 which I have always found to be suboptimal at best when it comes to formats for making images. 4:5 is the absolute best, 6:7 is the next best, and 4:3 is third best, so, I’ll take it. But the files are also pretty pliable and easy to work with, which is something that I remember from an Olympus OM-D EM10 that I had back in the day. I’m planning on picking up one of the Olympus 17/2.8 lenses for it to replace the kit zoom, which is also pretty competent all things considered. But the 17mm prime will work with that OVF I mentioned earlier, and I enjoy the simplicity and point-and-shoot nature of a fixed 35mm(ish) lens (in equivalent terms).

All in all I’m pretty stoked about this little camera. I think getting it set up with the OVF and that 17mm lens will go even further to make it a super compact little point and shoot camera that’s even more fun to use. If you’re in the market for something pretty close to pocketable then don’t discount some of these old M43 format cameras. They’re a significant jump in image quality compared to the sub-1” sensor stuff which is often not much better than a modern cell phone and you can find some gems that haven’t been insanely inflated in price just because some yutz on the internet made a video about it.