This first shot was taken with the E-3 and the 12-60mm lens zoomed-out to its widest equivalent of 24mm. If you’re familiar with our Gallery shots, you’ll see this has captured a noticeably larger area than those with 28mm coverage. The crops give a good indication of what you can expect from the E-3 and this lens with the default settings: smooth, detailed images which look very natural, and as you’d hope at 100 ISO, no evidence of noise. Impressively, the lens also remains sharp right up to the corners.

Landscape: 4.12MB, Program, 1/250, f6.3, ISO 100, 12-60mm at 39mm (equivalent to 78mm)

						Another shot taken under bright conditions with the E-3 and 12-60mm, this time roughly halfway through its range. As you’ll see with this lens, it performs very well throughout its focal range, and here at an equivalent of 78mm, is still delivering a very detailed image that’s well-corrected up to the corners. In terms of image processing, it’s again smooth and natural without being over-sharpened.

Landscape: 4.66MB, Program, 1/400, f7.1, ISO 200, 12-60mm at 60mm (equivalent to 120mm)

The E-3 kept the approaching boat in sharp focus, although we found it could be less reliable with other moving subjects.

If you’re really looking closely at the shadow areas, there’s subtle processing artefacts faintly visible, but this is serious pixel peeping and we’d be more than happy using the E-3 at 200 ISO.

In Program mode, the E-3 selected an aperture of f10 which unsurprisingly has resulted in a reasonably large depth of field, but opened to f4 you can effectively throw a distant background out of focus.

The crops are again smooth and detailed without being overly sharp, although again there’s some subtle processing artefacts for pixel peepers.

The increase in sensitivity hasn’t had a detrimental effect here. There’s a small amount of processing if you’re looking, but otherwise the samples are again clean, detailed and natural-looking.

Many cameras underexpose this shot, but the E-3 has done a good job with the indoor lighting and the colour balance is reasonably close.

The crops do show some visible processing and noise artefacts if you’re looking very closely, but the textures are quite fine and a high degree of detail remains. Again we’d be happy using the E-3 at 400 ISO.

For this second indoor shot we increased the sensitivity to 800 ISO. Many cameras we test underexpose this shot and the E-3 was no different, so we applied +1EV here.

Like all Four Thirds cameras, the E-3 has a physically smaller sensor than most DSLRs, so there’s concern over lower quality at higher sensitivities, but this sample proves the results can actually be very good at 800 ISO.

There’s certainly increased artefacts, but still plenty of detail in the crops when viewed at 100%. The built-in IS also handled the slower shutter speed.

But before you write-off the E-3 at 1600 ISO, do compare it with our Galleries for other DSLRs, where the results can be quite similar.

So overall, a surprisingly good set of results for anyone who assumed the E-3’s smaller sensor would seriously compromise it at higher sensitivities.