The forthcoming Olympus E-30 promises to be a nice creative dSLR which will not only suit those who don’t like using Photoshop or Lightroom to post-process but should give the photographer and perhaps subject, inspiration to experiment.

Olympus dSLRs are renown for excellent jpegs straight from the camera which minimise need for post-processing – unlike many other cameras – and these creative filters may further remove the need to sit behind a computer and give you more time experimenting in the field.

See here for examples of in-camera creative effects including a nice soft focus and a vignetted pin hole camera effect seem very useful.

Of course, the E30 has other creative abilities not available on many other cameras such as flip out live preview LCD which can be useful for self portraits (aided by face detection AF) and difficult positions where you can’t get your eye behind the camera, and of course it has in-built image stabilisation (up to 5 stops) providing IS even for super wide angle lenses allowing hand held exposures even down to 0.5sec at 14mm focal length in 35mm terms.

Another new feature is the multi-exposure mode allowing up to 4 photos to be overlaid in-camera, and if you are bored you can even select 4 RAW images and play with superimposing these in the camera.

To further reduce the need for post-processing, you can choose one of the nine image aspect ratios before shooting such as 16:9 for wide cinematic style images.

And its 5fps shutter speed combined with an excellent AF system should enable reasonable functionality for most sports – although live preview mode may still not be fast enough for AF for action shots.