Olympus PEN E-P1 or The Great Divide
After patiently waiting for stock availability, I eventually received my PEN camera and started playing with it. What I wrote here isn't exactly a review. Instead I'm concentrating on aspects I've been most interested in. You'll find that I've mostly written about specific issues pointed by almost all reviews but I have tried to elaborate a bit further on some.
A crash summary about the E-P1 concept
The idea is to fit a large sensor in a small camera body. As trivial as it may sound, most traditional camera makers didn't bother re-thinking their camera lines until now. It was either a finger nail-sized sensor in a compact body with rudimentary mechanics and electronics or a larger sensor in relatively expensive, large, heavy and complex opto-electro-mechanical body. Until now.
HP B9180 – Service Stall – End Of Life? or Not
Hmm...
Last week I found my printer monitor displaying "Operation Stall, check for carriage obstruction, press OK". I checked, nothing. Pressed OK. The printer was now displaying "Service Stall, Press OK to continue". It would keep displaying it no matter I'd try (move the carriage, unplug it for the night, ...).
Today, after 5 days, I pressed OK again on that Service Stall message. The printer displayed READY. It works now.
I might subscribe to that HP Care plan after all...
-Z.
I *heart* Canon TC-80N3
Seriously...
This is a totally biased review. I think it's bad. What is so wrong with it?
It’s here… the Olympus PEN!
I interrupt this program to annouce the arrival of my Olympus E-P1. Biased "Review" with more added value than any competing blog to come soon !
My Cyan Double Profile
On my HP B9180 Notepad post, I was concluding my first print experience with a print showing a strong exposure bias and a magenta cast. This was the result of the software workflow applying two profiling corrections before sending the print job to the printer. A quick search taught me it's usually referred to as double profiling. I recommend reading this article written by Mike Chaney on Steve's Digicams. Quoting a very tiny bit from it :
(...)The most common symptom of double profiling is overblown or garish colors with a color cast (usually magenta or green) in gray areas. Since most profiles lighten up prints a bit, double profiling also causes most prints to appear too bright, (...)
Exactly !
Specialty Media tray loading? uh?
So I depleted my remaining HP Advanced glossy sheets and moved on trying an A4 sheet of Ilford GFS (Gold Fibre Silk gets a bit tiring to write after a while).
I must confess right away that I didn't read the extended User Guide and thought I'd figure this out. It turned out I rushed a little 
Paper size, Aspect Ratio & Print Area optimization
Venturing in paper land, I started thinking about combinations of different aspect ratio on different paper size while retaining the lowest cost possible. Another concern is to be able to reuse the same type of paper for every print size as I intend to concentrate on gathering experience on Ilford Gold Fibre Silk paper. One may argue that there are probably cheaper papers to learn printing... surely.
Formats of interests are :
Paper designation : Paper size (mm) : aspect ratio
- A3 : 297 × 420 : 1,414141414
- A3+ : 329 x 483 : 1,468085 (unexpectedly larger than normal A3!)
- A4 : 210 × 297 : 1,414285714
- A6 : 105 × 148 : 1,40952381
HP B9180 Notepad
Unboxing
Nothing special in the box. You'll find a power cable, two cd's, the printheads, 8 ink cartridges, a large paper storage bag (the MOAB paper sample box is not included). It is written on the box that the USB cable might not be included in your country. Indeed no USB cable.
The printer is fairly large and its lines and colours are boring sober. The build quality is OK and relies on good quality plastics but it looks less robust than Canon 9000 & 9500 printers.
First Post !
Welcome to this humble web log. Check the other pages for its purpose, its author and its ongoing topics.
-Z.