OM System has put the PEN name back on a camera. The part worth your attention is a small switch on the front of the grip.
In 1958 a young Olympus designer named Yoshihisa Maitani was handed a project nobody else at the company seemed to care much about. The brief was a camera that could sell for 6,000 yen, at a time when the cheapest thing Olympus made cost more than 20,000. What he came back with was the PEN, a half frame camera meant to be as easy to carry as a pen, and it was an instant hit in Japan. The whole idea was that photography should be small enough and cheap enough to take with you every day.
The name has meant different things since then. The digital PEN-F from 2016 is the one black and white photographers remember. It put a dial on the front of the body that took you straight into its Monochrome Profile Control, with color filters and film grain you could set before you pressed the shutter. For a lot of people it was the first digital camera that seemed to actually want to shoot black and white. It went out of production, and the people who loved it have been waiting for something to take its place ever since.
What OM System actually announced
The new camera is simply called the OM System PEN, the first PEN to carry the OM System name. It is a Micro Four Thirds body with a 20.4MP sensor, a rangefinder style shape with the electronic viewfinder tucked into the top left corner, a 3 inch screen that swivels out, and 5.5 stops of in body stabilization. It is also the first PEN with weather sealing, rated IPX1 when paired with a sealed lens, which is one of those things that only matters the first time you get caught in the rain with it.
Body only it costs $999.99 and ships in late October in black or silver. There is a kit with a refreshed 14-42mm lens for $1,099.99 and a second kit adding the 40-150mm for $1,299.99. That is half what OM System asked for the OM-3 last year, which shares the same color and monochrome tools, and that comparison is where most of the interesting questions start.
The switch on the front is the real story
Look at the front of the grip and there is a small switch marked Color and Mono. Turn it and you are in the camera’s profile controls without going anywhere near a menu. The monochrome side gives you four starting points, Film B&W with grain built in, Film IR which leans on a red filter to mimic infrared film, Film Low Contrast for a softer look, and a plain Standard setting. On top of any of them you can stack five adjustments, a color filter, highlight and shadow control, shading, film grain and a tone effect.
The color filter is the one to understand properly. It works the way a red or yellow filter on the front of a lens always has, deciding how each color turns into a shade of gray before the file is written. Red darkens a blue sky and yellow lightens skin. It is the same idea behind using the color editor on a black and white conversion, just moved from the edit to the moment you take the picture.
The part that may matter more over time is something OM System calls Profile Library. Its phone app, OI.Share, can read the settings from a photo you made with these profiles and load them into the camera’s preset slots. It works with the OM-3 as well, so a look you settle on can follow you from one body to another instead of living in one camera’s menus.
Seeing in black and white before you press the shutter
There is a quieter benefit here that has nothing to do with the files. With a monochrome profile set, the viewfinder shows you the scene in black and white while you compose, and that changes what you notice. Color stops competing for your attention, and you start reading light, tone and shape instead. Shoot raw alongside the JPEG and you give up nothing, since the raw file keeps its color for later, but the decision about what the picture is gets made at your eye rather than at your desk.
Worth being honest about what it is not
The sensor is not the stacked one inside the OM-3. It is the conventional 20.4MP chip from the OM-5 Mark II, a sensor that has been around in one form or another for years, and PetaPixel made the fair point that an imaging pipeline this familiar starts to feel repetitive. DPReview found the autofocus less dependable than the best current cameras, with subject detection sometimes overriding the focus point you picked, and there is no joystick for moving that point around.
Does any of that matter for black and white? For a lot of the work people here do, not much. A slow walk with one lens, a morning spent waiting for the light to come around, a street corner you keep going back to, none of it leans hard on subject tracking. It is still worth knowing going in that this is not the PEN-F successor some people were hoping for, and DPReview said as much. What it is instead is a cheaper, weather sealed way into the same color and monochrome tools OM System gave the OM-3.
The first PEN was about making photography small enough and cheap enough to carry every day, and this one does something similar for a considered black and white look, which is a narrower promise than the original, but a genuinely useful one. Whether it is enough comes down to whether you like to decide in the camera or at the desk.