Review Date: September 28, 2015
Category: Entry-level
USER’S EXPERIENCE
The Olympus AIR A01 takes some getting used to, especially at first. You will need to take your time to set it up and familiarize yourself with all of its features before heading out to take pictures. Forgive yourself if you feel stumped as you try to set it up to work with your smartphone. Fortunately, the Air walks you through the setup process step by step, so do not try to rush or skip a step. It can be difficult at first to unscrew the back (AIR Coupling, aka phone holder) to access the Wi-Fi switch and to lift out the fragile rear cover to access the microSD card slot. Take your time, identify all the markings, line them up properly, and use common sense: if something does not easily and smoothly come out, do not force it.
The first time when you start the app, it walks you step by step to pair the A01 to your device. It’s pretty easy though you may want to familiarize yourself with the physical aspects of the A01 first by downloading the Olympus AIR A01 Instruction Manual. The Guide is also available in the app itself (Home – click on the Gear icon at top right – Guide). The instructions will march you into attaching a lens, attaching the nifty Auto Open Lens Cap, detaching the AIR Coupling, removing the Rear Cover, inserting a microSD card, and then putting them all back. You will also need to know how to switch your smartphone’s Wi-Fi entry to point to the Wi-Fi of the A01. You also need to turn your smartphone’s Bluetooth on.
Once the one-time setup is completed, you are from then on presented with the home screen with four options:
- Mode Dial (scroll right and left to access: Art Filter, Color Creator, Photo Story, Clips and Genius)
- View Images
- Camera Settings
- Amazon cloud drive
Mode Dial is where you will probably spend most of your time. You have iAUTO shooting mode to let the A01 take care of all the exposure settings for you. Or, switch to one of the PASM shooting modes for more or total control over the A01. You can shoot in RAW, select a White Balance (AUTO, plus 6 options, though there is no Manual Balance) and ISO (AUTO, plus from LOW, 200 – 12800).
Video is recorded in MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 with stereo sound and continuous AF. You can zoom while recording video though the sensitive microphone will pick up the zooming (and any other) sound. You cannot take a still photo while recording video since pressing the shutter button will simply stop the recording. I’m not sure how long you can record continuously but I have recorded past 20 minutes.
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To select a video image size: With Video mode selected, go to Mode Dial – click on Gear icon – select a Record Mode.
Besides the requisite Art Filter effects, other creative options are Color Creator (adjust color hue and saturation), Photo Story (collage that combines different photos into one of four styles), Clips (shoot and combine multiple video clips into a single one) and Genius (six different versions of your photo with one click of the shutter).
To its credit, Olympus has tried to make the operation of the AIR as intuitive as possible. (Even the Instruction Manual does not address how to use the AIR, just how to setup it up.) Since the display screen on your smartphone is touch panel, you can tap anywhere on screen to select focus.
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You can even set the AIR to focus and shoot with just a tap on your smartphone’s screen: [Mode Dial – Settings – Live View Touch Operation – Touch AF Shutter – Done]
Besides the virtual on-screen shutter, you can also use the physical shutter button on the A01. This is conveniently large enough to be thumb-operated. It’s two stage: touch lightly to lock focus and press all the way down to take the picture. The AF is fast and accurate in good lighting, though it will hunt a bit in very low light situations.
Whether there is a lag between moving the AIR to point at a subject and the image appearing on your connected device’s display will in a large measure depend on the processing power of your device. I have read where some reviewers encountered little lag with the A01 paired to their smartphone, but I had horrible lag using my basic smartphone. The display would freeze and refuse to come back again. Switching to my iPad mini, the lag practically disappeared.
There is a limited Control Panel that you access by tapping on the 2×3 rectangular icon. It brings up six options: Drive Mode (Single, Sequential), Picture Mode (i-Enhance, Vivid, Natural, Muted, Portrait, Monotone, e-Portrait), Metering (ESP, Ctr-Weighted, Single Point), Face Priority (Off, ON, On + Eye-Priority), AF Mode (S-AF, MF) and Aspect (4:3, 16:9, 3:2, 1:1).
Of course, the number of options depends on the shooting mode selected.
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To select Manual Focus: Mode Dial – click on 2×3 rectangular icon – AF Mode – MF. Then turn the manual focus ring on your lens.
When you start the OA.CENTRAL app, it will automatically turn on the AIR (extending the lens, if needed). However, if your smartphone is connected to another Wi-Fi network (say, the one of your home or office), an error message will pop up asking you to switch to the AIR Wi-Fi network in your Wi-Fi settings.
You can turn off the camera from the OA.CENTRAL app. Go to Home – Camera Settings – slide OFF to the right and the camera will power off.
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– Pressing the physical Power button when the AIR is paired with a device will do nothing.
– If you exit the OA.CENTRAL app, pressing and releasing the Power button will put the camera into sleep mode (the LED Illuminator slowly blinks green). To turn the camera off completely, press and hold the Power button for about 3 seconds.
Because your smartphone is paired with the A01 wirelessly, you can seperate it from the A01. The range is pretty good and it allows some fun and creative shooting. You can go crazy with unusual angles, do selfies, etc. Of course, if you are physically separated from your smartphone, you will not see what you are shooting. Those who espouse the 10 Golden Rules of Lomography will have a field day.
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To shoot continuously at up to 10 fps: Mode Dial – click on 2×3 rectangular icon – Drive Mode – Sequential. Then press and hold down the (physical or virtual) shutter button to shoot at 10 fps. The camera will pause while it saves all the images.
Playback of images again will depend on the processing power of your device. On my iPad mini, scrolling is pretty fast but each image takes about 2 sec. to fully load.
Shooting RAW+JPEG (Super Fine) takes about 7 sec. to save.
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To shoot RAW go to: Mode Dial – click on Gear icon – slide RAW+JPEG on. You can select the JPEG size on the same screen: click Image Quality – select Pixel Count and Compression.
At first, it’s pretty hard holding the A01 in one hand and your device in the other. It’s especially frustrating trying to get horizontally levelled shots. Since the A01 is cylindrical in shape, you have no physical clue as to where top is and where bottom is. Even resting the AIR on a level surface is no guarantee since there is no flat surface on the camera and the latter rolls. You can always use a small tripod, but then that kind of defeats the whole purpose, doesn’t it?
The AIR does have a virtual level. Small lines to the bottom and right of the display screen indicate whether the camera is horizontally or vertically levelled. They are small to see, even on my iPad mini screen, and so far apart that I have to keep shifting my gaze from the image to the bottom and then to the right of the screen, and repeat the circuit as I try to compose and keep my horizon level at the same time. As you rotate and move the Air, the little lines flutter until they turn green to indicate the camera is now level.
Missing is a panorama mode, a HDR mode, taking a still picture without interrupting video recording, Live (or Playback) Histogram and manual WB. There’s also no built-in flash, so no fill-in for portraits, freezing action or flash at night.
There is no built-in image stabilizer as in the other Olympus mirrorless cameras. Shooting with the 14-42 mm kit lens did not pose a problem, but using longer focal length lenses may require the use of a tripod. Unless, that is, you use Panasonic M43 lenses, which include image stabilization.
There is no Dust Reduction System, so accumulating dust onto the sensor is a real possibility.
The Air A01 is more suited for unhurried photography. Don’t expect to just slip it onto your smartphone and start snapping pictures like you would with a dedicated mirrorless camera. You need to pair the two devices first, switch Wi-Fi on your smartphone to point to the Air A01 and wait for a couple of seconds for the connection to establish and the image to display on your smartphone.
I shot almost all my test images in iAUTO mode. The icons and text are small (even on the large screen of the iPad mini) and I had to continuously peer at the display to select settings.
Olympus claims that the Air A01 integrates with Amazon Cloud Drive for direct-to-cloud storage. I may be reading it wrong, but the marketing seems to imply that the Air A01 can skip saving images to its microSD card and save them directly to Amazon Cloud. Unfortunately, we do not have an Amazon Cloud Drive subscription (why not also interface with Apple iCloud, Dropbox, etc.?), so we have not tested this capability in this review. The Air A01 has its own Wi-Fi network that you need to connect to on your smartphone. Once you are connected to the Air A01, you cannot also be connected to Amazon Cloud Drive, so we’re not sure how the AIR can bypass the microSD card and save directly to cloud storage.
No review is complete without some improvement suggestions:
- Add in-camera Image Stabilizer
- Add Dust reduction system
- Provide Manual WB
- Display a Live Histogram
- Add Panorama mode, HDR mode, ability to take a still picture without interrupting video recording
- Provide a battery replacement service for the A01, and make the battery replaceable in future versions
- Flatten the surface at “bottom” so the AIR can sit level
I know that most people considering the AIR A01 will probably purchase it wth the collapsible 14-42 mm zoom kit lens, but where the AIR A01 will really shine, IMHO, is pairing it with a large aperture portrait lens, such as the M.Zuiko 45mm (90 mm equiv.) f/1.8 portrait lens. The large aperture of the portrait lens has a shallow depth of field which will make your subject pop against a beautiful background defocus. This defocus is not quite possible with the 14-42mm f3.5-5.6 zoom lens or with the lens on your smartphone (unless the blurring is artificially added in software).
Whether you think the Olympus AIR A01 is not yet ready for prime time use or it’s a fun camera that extends your creative photography options all depends on your expectations. Once I got over the first few frustrating moments figuring out how best to hold and operate it, I swear there was a mischievous gleam that came into my eyes as the possibilities of a discreet, completely silent camera that does not look like a camera dawned into my mind. If I were to get the AIR, I would also upgrade my smartphone to one with a more powerful processor and I would opt for a portrait lens, for that is where I think the wow factor would be most apparent.
Next: Olympus AIR A01 QuickFact Sheet / Buy
What is the future of Lens-style cameras?
Olympus bills the AIR A01 as a new concept—and we have to agree. We’ve found that it does not quite fit neatly into existing camera categories. It cannot be directly compared to a dedicated mirrorless camera (due to its cylindrical shape that introduces handling challenges and also because of its more or less complete reliance on your smartphone/tablet) and it is much more than a lens attachment that makes your smartphone shoot better pictures.Finally, we decided that the AIR is indeed a new way to think of the camera, uncoupling it from its display screen and, if it gets traction and continuous improvements are applied to this new concept, that we may well start seeing other forms of the camera. Not just the traditional rectangular shaped camera that you bring up to your eye to take a picture, but perhaps paired to all kinds of display and viewing devices, not just to your smartphone or tablet.
We decided to play a little game and think of other connected devices a future version of AIR could connect to: Google glass and Apple Watch; a camera mounted on a drone; the peephole camera on your front door; the rearview camera in your car or even allow a windshield display (or GPS display screen) in your car to automatically pair with the camera mounted on the dashboard of that truck you are following and thinking of passing?
What differentiates the AIR from other cameras that also connect to your smartphone is that the software and platform in the AIR A01 is open source, so anyone who has a bright idea can write an app for it. This opens up all kinds of possibilities besides the ones we’ve touched upon.
Whether it is for discreetly photographing the birds and other wildlife that visit your garden, for surveillance (and obtain quality images—why do surveillance cameras capture poor quality images in the first place?), mounted in hard-to-reach places for movie making, for fun and for creative photography—the uses of a lens-style camera are only limited by your imagination.
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