Olympus Pen E-P3 has been in my camera collection for about a year now. Initially, I only bought it to try this camera and its jpeg customization functionality. Even developed several recipes for it. But over this year, I’ve kept coming back to it and could not pull the trigger to sell it back. There is just something special about it, its colors and handling.

What I like

I’ve shot about 1,000 images with the Olympus Pen E-P3. Maybe a bit more. And over this year that I’ve had it, I also tried more than 30 other cameras from different ages and brands. And now I think I can formulate with more clarity what exactly I like about this particular Olympus:

1. It looks and handles well, has lots of buttons and a flash

I really like how this camera looks and feels to shoot. It is inspired by more retro-style designs for sure, but unlike many retro-looking cameras, this E-P3 feels great in the hand. This small grip on the body and the slight thumb rest make for a great combination. And it is rather light and very compact, much more so than you would expect from looking at the pictures.

Olympus Pen E-P3 is smaller than the iPhone 14 Pro Max

I also really like this vertical control wheel for aperture-priority shooting. It has this nice clickiness, it is in just the right place, and works exactly like I want it.

You also get surprisingly many buttons, most of them are customizable. Check my tips at the end of this article to see one feature I really like to use with these customizations.

And as a bonus you get a somewhat decent built-in flash in this Olympus. Great for casual shooting.

2. The autofocus is great for such an old camera

I usually use center focus and recompose or the touchscreen to choose the focus point. In these scenarios, the autofocus works very fast and almost always accurate. It does depend on the lens you are using of course. For instance, Olympus Pen E-P3 with the Lumix 20mm 1.7 is actually faster to focus than using my Sony a7II with the Tamron 35 2.8 lens, which haunts a bit. But an Olympus 17mm 2.8 lens is slower and less accurate.

3. Great colors

Olympus seem to just know how to get colors right. You can do a lot of customization for you jpegs, but no matter which settings you choose — greens and oranges look great. If you use raw files, you don’t need a lot of adjustments to make the pictures look great. With the right lens, the photos also look kinda vintage by default, maybe a bit. film-like.

4. Resolution is enough for social media. Even for YouTube on a TV.

What you quickly learn is that 12mp is more than enough for most scenarios. The pictures look great on social media and even on a TV. This makes total sense given that the photos are 4032x3024 , which is more than the number of pixels on a 4K TV (3840x2160).

What I still don’t like

1. Raw files are just not very nice

The raw files from this camera have the ORF format and are just not very flexible. I find it very difficult to correct colors or exposure if I need to. Any significant edit just makes the images look very weird. You are better of shooting jpegs with this camera as there are better alternative for shooting raw (later Olympus Pen E-PLs or Lumix GF cameras).

2. It is slow to turn on, no sleep mode

You take a picture, turn the camera off, walk a bit, and then see something and want to take another picture. You turn the camera on just 10 seconds after you turned it off. You would expect it to be ready near instantly. But it is not. It checks the sensor stabilization with this brrr sound and it takes about 4-5 seconds to fully wake up and be ready to be used.

You might decide to just leave it on all the time, but the issue is this camera has a touchscreen, so you might accidentally push something you did not plan to. Maybe turning off the touch capabilities might be a solution, but then again, it is very convenient to use touch-to-focus on this camera. I don’t know what a solution here might be.

3. The shutter sound is loud and obnoxious. And you can not switch it off

Olympus Pen E-P3 does not have an electronic shutter functionality, which means you will always hear this loud click when you take a photo. Which is fine. But I just really don’t like the shutter sound and feel on this camera, even though I must admit I am biased — after using old DSLRs with their satisfying mirror slaps and shutter sound, it is somewhat difficult to enjoy more modern cameras.

Who this camera might be for

Honestly, I think this is kind of a tricky question. Nowadays, you could find a lot of great options in the M4/3 family (Lumix and Olympus cameras), and for not much more money, you could get cameras with better resolution and maybe even some video capabilities. But for about $100-150, this E-P3 just might be one of those cameras that you should not overthink about. It is very compact, looks great, you get access to all the M4/3 lenses (which there are plenty of, and they are not expensive), and you get these nice and somewhat vintage colors. So if you

already have a camera with better resolution
just want a second compact daily carry for casual photography
want to try jpeg customization and tired of hearing about Fujifilm recipes
want to try something less explored yet still great

this camera might be a great option. I think it will also not lose a lot of value over time so you could always sell it back after some time if you get bored of it.

My favorite lens for Olympus Pen E-P3

I tried several lenses with my E-P3: Lumix G Vario 14-42, Olympus 17mm 2.8, and Lumix 20mm 1.7. The latter is just so much better than any alternative that I can not really recommend anything else. You could get one for $150-200 or even less if you are patient. It is sharp, has very nice rendering, you get some bokeh wide open, and it is very small.

Here are some images taken with this lens on different M4/3 cameras:

My Olympus jpeg recipes

Some time ago, I experimented with jpeg recipes for these Olympus cameras. I have created 4 recipes that are somewhat distinct. I tried them on Olympus Pen E-P3 and Olympus Pen Mini, but they should work similarly on any other Olympus cameras. Here they are:

And if you want to see samples for each recipe, check out this video on my YouTube channel.

Some tips

As a side note, here are some tips for Olympus Pen E-P3:

Try to get things right in-camera as much as possible, raw files here are not very flexible.
Don’t use kit zoom lenses, they are not very nice on this camera. Go for some Lumix or Olympus primes. My favorite one is Lumix 20mm 1.7.
Turn face detection off because it will not work correctly anyway. It will more likely mess things up for you. This camera is old.
You can customize one of the buttons on the back panel to shoot with a different picture preset when holding it. Let’s say you have 2 favorite recipes — one color and one monochrome. Instead of switching between them in the menu, you can use the color preset by default and set one of the buttons to use your monochrome preset while holding it. This way, you can just quickly choose to take a B&W picture without going into settings.

Olympus Pen E-P3: 1,000 photos later