Hello All: I'm looking at purchasing the Olympus EPL-2 camera relatively soon and am wondering if it works with the EV-1 (optical, not digital) viewfinder. If it does, would there be any problems using the EV-1 viewfinder with the lens that the camera ships with? Thanks, John
The optical viewfinder is the VF-1 and it fits perfectly into the E-PL2's hot shoe. Note there are no electronics at all in the VF-1; it's just a little window thats framed for the Olympus 17mm lens. The frame lines fit the Panasonic 20mm lens pretty well, while the entire viewfinder window can be used to frame the Panasonic 14mm lens. You could use it with the kit zoom lens, though you'd probably want to keep the zoom at or around 17mm for proper framing. I'm not sure if there are any other issues to be aware of with the kit zoom, since I've never tried it. Oh, and you will experience parallax error if you try to focus on things that are too close.
The VF-1 will fit any standard flash hotshoe on basically any camera and is usable on any lens with a similar field-of-view as the 17mm pancake. As to whether it actually does anything useful, well...umm...I suppose it looks kind of cool.
