People may appreciate new technologies in their cameras, but they also love the busy designs of cameras from years past. The new Olympus PEN-F embraces retro in a big way, borrowing elements from the company’s original 35mm PEN-F camera from 1963.
Sporting a stunning throwback aesthetic, the camera combines a luxurious metal construction, magnesium top cover, leather-grained accents, and knurled aluminum dials. Like old cameras, it’s swamped in an inordinate amount of physical controls, with multiple dials on top, buttons on the back, and even a dial out front for quickly switching between color modes just like retro photography equipment.
The Olympus PEN-F is a micro-four thirds camera housing a 20-megapixel Live MOS image sensor, with the company’s TruePic VII image processor and five-axis optical image stabilization. Want something with more detail than 20 megapixels? It comes with a tripod-optimized high-res shooting mode that takes eight images in one go, then stitches the results into a single 50-megapixel picture, along with a 1/8000 mechanical shutter that enables a sequential shooting mode of 10 frames per second. It’s also the first PEN camera with an eye-level OLED viewfinder (2.36 million pixels) to go along with the 3-inch flip-and-swivel touchscreen display that doubles as an autofocus targeting pad. Video recording maxes out at 1080p 60fps, although there is an option to turn stills into 4K timelapse movies.
Designed for street photographers, the Olympus PEN-F is priced at $1,199.99.