Hands on: Olympus Pen E-P1 review

For even more options, click on the Menu button (also found on the back of the camera) and here you will be able to change Picture modes, Gradation, and even which way the dial direction goes.

While it's always easy to lose your way among myriad menu screens, the E-P1 seems intuitive and if you do change something you shouldn't have, the Custom Reset option is easy to find.

The final piece of furniture on the back of the camera is a horizontal zoom mechanism, which is a bit cumbersome to use. Maybe we are used to the zoom being part of the shutter button, but it just didn't feel quite right.

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MODE DIAL: Sunken into the camera, the Mode dial is flipped from the back

Moving to the top of the E-P1 there's the aforementioned sunken Mode dial. Sporting eight options, here you can whiz through the many photo modes available, including Auto, the customisable Programme Auto and Manual shooting. For the creatives, there's a number of filter options under the guise of Art Filters.

Here you can pimp your images to look like Pop Art, Grainy Film and even Soft Focus. Not one for imaging purists, then, but fun all the same. Scene mode is what you expect from a digicam (there's 19 'scenes' available) with things like Night+Portrait, Children and Macro present.

Next to Mode dial is a hotshoe. This is for either the Flash accessory that's sold separately or an optional optical viewfinder. The latter works well, considering the camera is based around LiveView technology. On the right-hand side, there's the power and shutter button.

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LENS OPTIONS: While we used a pancake lens, a zoom one is available

Marc Chacksfield

Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.