Bon voyage: OM System PEN means every kind of photographer has a travel option

I’m not sure how it took us so long to get back to this point, but in my head, the launch of the OM System PEN marks the return of a time when keen photographers have some really good choices for travel. 

Not travel photography as in ‘spend thousands of dollars to go to Iceland or Namibia, and drag your medium format setup to painstakingly capture one perfect desktop background,’ but a camera I can carry with me to document my trip.

Between the Fujifilm X100 VI, the Panasonic L10 and the OM System PEN, photographers once again have a choice of conveniently-sized cameras with a good level of control, whether they prefer a prime lens camera, a fixed zoom compact or the lens choices of mirrorless. They’re all pretty small, they’re all fairly pretty, and they’re all usefully totable.

Richard Butler

When I first started at DPReview, the options available were a DSLR, if you wanted decent image quality, or a (literally) compact camera, which you could carry around, but whose images you would probably be disappointed by. In between were the supposed “bridge” cameras, which inexplicably adopted some of the size of a DSLR with the image quality of a compact, rather than offering any sort of useful middle ground between the two.

This is why I’ve always loved larger-sensor enthusiast compacts with bright lenses (LX3, XZ-2, G7X), and why I can remember running to the Olympus stand as Photokina 2008 first opened, so I could share some of the first photos of the original Pen mockup.

I remember frantically negotiating to get someone to remove the glass case so that I could grab some of the first photos of the original Pen mockup at Photokina 2008, excited by the prospect of a small camera that could take good-quality photos.Richard Butler

I love a camera that’s easy to always carry with me but also one that delivers sufficient image quality to make that worthwhile. And for a while there, we got close: the Fujifilm X100, the Panasonic GF1 and GX1, amongst others. Then the options started to disappear.

The past few years have seen a lot of camera makers focus on full-frame cameras, but even the best attempts at downsizing those aren’t great. Putting aside that Panasonic S9 and original Sony a7C are among my least favorite cameras of the last few years, my concerns aren’t so much the bodies as the body/lens combinations. Yes it’s easy to cherry-pick one particular lens when trying to make “it’s almost as small” arguments. But, even on the rare occasions where that pancake is a focal length I want to use, and the word “almost” isn’t being tested to breaking point, there’s still little hope of building a usefully small kit.

Richard Butler

I’ve just got back from a short vacation with the PEN and found it to be a very amiable companion. I took the 12mm F2.0, 17mm F1.8 and 14-42mm, which gave me a remarkable degree of flexibility in combinations I could take everywhere with me. Add in a 45mm F1.8 and it would cover an awful lot of my favored photography, in the space of a small shoulder bag.

The PEN makes a very welcome addition to the existing options of a Fujifilm X100 VI, which is built around my preferred single focal length, and the Panasonic L10, whose lens covers a very useful range with a combination of brightness and size that even the PEN would struggle to match.

All of these cameras is imperfect in one way or another: the L10’s lens isn’t everything you might hope for, the PEN’s AF is distinctly quirky and after six iterations, Fujifilm has managed to make the X100 VI that bit more fiddly than it needs to be. But, for all those gripes, it’s lovely to have choices that don’t take over my entire carry-on.

Vamanos! Allonz-y! However you say it; let’s just GO!