8 Cameras That Come With Digital or Art Filters

Some photographers hate anything that remotely resembles digital or art filters in their cameras. For others, though, art filters or digital filters, however you call it, are a welcome features in a camera — one they can have fun with.

It’s like an extension of the traditional built-in image parameters like monochrome, vivid, sepia and so on.

Olympus pioneered the production of DSLR cameras with on board Art Filters with the release of the E-30. Since then, all Olympus DSRLs and its recent Micro Four Thirds cameras, the E-P1 and E-P2, have the feature on board.

Meanwhile, Pentax has also jumped into the filters bandwagon and introduced its own Digital Filters when it released the K-7 and while Pentax was at it, it expanded further the way users can apply the filters.

Without further ado, here the eight cameras equipped with the Digital Filters or Art Filters feature.

High Contrast from K-7

1. Pentax K-7

The K-7′s Digital filters can be applied either in recording mode or playback mode. In recording mode, you can select from nine digital fiters namely:

• Toy Camera: for taking pictures that look as if taken with a toy camera
• Retro: pictures with the look of old photos
• High Contrast: as the name suggests, foer taking pictures with high contrast
• Extract Color: for extricating a specific colour and taking the rest of the photo black and white
• Soft: for taking pictures with a soft focus throughout the image
• Star Burst: for taking pictures of night scene sor light reflected on water with a special sparking look
• Fish-eye: for taking pictures that look as if taken with fish eye lenses
• Custom (choose you preferred digital art setting)

Toy Camera digital filter

In playback mode, you can apply digital filters to the pictures you have taken. The filters available are:  Toy Camera, Retro,  High Contrast, Extract Color, Soft, Star Burst, Fish-eye and Custom. In addition you can also apply the filters below while in playback mode:

• Monochrome: creates monochrome images
• Color: adds colour filter to an image. User can select a combination of six colours and three tones
• Water Color: creates an image that looks as if it was painted
• Pastel: creates images as though they were drawn with crayon
• Slim: changes the horizontal and vertical ratio of an image
• Miniature: blurs part of image to to create a fake miniature scene
• HDR: creates an image that looks like a HDR image
• Base Parameter Adj: adjust the paramertes to create the desired image
• Custom (customise and save a filter to your own preferences)

2. pentax K-x

Pentax K-x inherited all the K-7′s digital art filters above. It also has the ability to “cross-process” — the ability to generate random changes to an image.

Retro digital filter

3. Olympus E-30

The Olympus E-30 brings Art Filters into the mainstream. It offered six filters namely:

• Pop Art: Enhances colors, making them more saturated and vivid, creating high-impact pictures that express the joyful, lighthearted feeling of the Pop Art style of the 1960s
• Soft Focus: Creates an ethereal atmosphere that renders subjects in a heavenly light without obscuring details
• Pale& Light Color: Encloses the foreground of an image in flat gentle light and pastel colors reminiscent of a flashback scene in a movie
• Light Tone: Renders shade and highlight areas softly to lend an elegant air to the subject
• Grainy Film: Evokes the feeling of documentary footage shot in monochrome with grainy, high-contrast film
• Pin Hole Camera: Reduces the peripheral brightness of an image as though it were hot through a pin hole, connecting the viewer intimately with the subject at the center of the picture. [Source: Olympus]

4. Olympus E-620 (the E-620 also comes with all the six art filters)

5. Olympus e-600 (the E-600 comes with three Art Filters namely Pop Art, Soft Focus, and Pin Hole)

6. Olympus e-450 (the E-450 also comes with three Art Filters namely Pop Art, Soft Focus, and Pin Hole)

7. Olympus E-P1 (the E-P1 comes with all the six Art Filters)

8. Olympus E-P2

Comes with all six Art Filters plus two new ones — Diorama and Cross Process.

• Diorama: gives users a miniature model photo feeling by narrowing the depth of focus and enhancing color and contrast. [Source: Olympus]
• Cross Process:  offers an unexpected look to images and videos by changing the color and contrast of subjects. [Source: Olympus]