Buying the 17 Year-Old E-P1 in 2026
The Olympus E-P1 has become Ethan Hansen’s main everyday camera over the past year, chosen in early 2025 as a replacement for the Fujifilm X100 due to its more solid build, interchangeable lenses, and much lower price on the used market.
Despite being around 17–18 years old, the E-P1 is still highly usable today and offers strong image quality, making it a great value pickup for modern photography. Ethan’s core recommendation is to invest in one primary autofocus lens that matches your preferred focal length. For him, this is the Olympus 17mm f/1.8 (35mm equivalent), which he uses almost exclusively.
He advises against overspending on newer lens versions, as older bodies like the E-P1 do not significantly benefit from the latest optical updates.Additional lenses include the 7Artisans 25mm f/1.8 manual focus lens for a compact and affordable 50mm equivalent option, and the 7Artisans 10mm f/3.5 ultra-wide lens, which is small, fun, and easy to use thanks to its deep depth of field.
Recommended accessories include the Olympus optical viewfinder for 35mm framing, which is bright, compact, and well matched to the camera’s rangefinder-style design, along with a simple short camera strap to keep the setup lightweight and unobtrusive.
The E-P1 supports JPEG, RAW, or RAW+JPEG shooting, but due to slow buffer performance, Ethan recommends choosing either JPEG or RAW instead of both. RAW files offer surprisingly good highlight recovery for such an old sensor, but Ethan prefers shooting JPEGs, especially in black and white.
His black-and-white setup includes increased contrast and sharpness, red or orange digital filters, and disabled noise reduction to achieve a film-like look similar to Kodak Tri-X.
For flash photography, he recommends the CEX KF01 flash, which matches the camera aesthetically and offers simple, effective manual control.
The Olympus E-P1 is widely available for around $100 on the used market, sometimes bundled with a lens, making it an accessible and highly enjoyable camera even in 2026.