I’m not a professional photographer or reviewer of gear. I’m an amateur so if you’re looking for an end to end review of the Olympus OM-D E-M1, hit up DPReview.
After a month of research and reading reviews, I decided to upgrade my aging Olympus E-PL2 that I bought in January of 2011. The three year old camera was functioning just fine. I used it extensively every few days and never had to replace a part, the 2 batteries I had worked great and every button is in great shape. Well, the On/Off button is slightly recessed and the turn knob sometimes gets stuck but it does the job. I’m not selling that camera and with the 17mm f/1.7 pancake lens will stick on that body and remain my ‘pocket camera’ for the foreseeable future.
It’s actually no surprise when you compare the camera I bought and the E-PL2 that they are not even in the same league anymore. The differences are staggering.
For this review, it’s not fair to compare the two so I won’t. It is challenging not to compare them as I’ve only owned 2 M43 cameras and they were both manufactured 3 years apart.
The E-M1 from Olympus is intended to be the flagship semi-pro camera of Micro Four Thirds systems. Think of it like the Canon 1D and the E-M5 as the 5D. Both are great cameras but the E-M1 is the granddaddy. It’s priced at $1299 for the body only and it has that $179 battery grip which is way overpriced (just like the one from Canon). You can use the viewfinder or live-view, it has WiFi built in, a tilting OLED display and is weather sealed. In fact, it’s the only weather sealed camera from Olympus. Keep in mind weather sealing bodies are only as good as their lenses. If you’re not using a weather sealed lens, then that benefit is moot.
Until just yesterday, the E-M1 was the only camera in its class that had a 5-axis image stabilization feature and sensor cleaning at startup.It truly is a professional camera for four-thirds owners except for that pesky small APS-C sensor that in no way compares to what the 5D and 1D have. That is its only shortcoming. For carrying, it’s actually great. Very light, lenses are smaller and the 2x crop means my 200mm lens is 400mm equivalent. Which means, the f/1.4 Leica 25mm I bought is a fantastic 50mm equivalent lens that takes amazing photos.
The best thing about the OM-D line of cameras is the body size allows for more buttons and they have the added benefit of a built-in viewfinder. I have really missed that a lot. I can now look into the view finder and setup ISO, shutter speed and aperture or even shooting modes without going through many menus. It was rare for me to shoot in manual mode on my PL2 because of the constant digging through menus. The viewfinder allows me to really concentrate on the subject and frame in ways that a screen on the back of a camera can’t do. The E-M1 has the same SLR features such as using the screen as a view of all of the photo settings and then you use the viewfinder to shoot. It’s a touch screen so raising your eye to the sensor disables the screen.
WiFi was a nice concept but I really haven’t been happy with its application. The iPhone app has worked once at collecting GPS bread crumbs all day and then applying them to my camera’s photo SD storage with lat,long information. So that’s nice because the RAW,JPEG files will have geo-data on them and that carries into Aperture and Flickr. The extra feature of WiFi is saving photos on my Olympus SD card to my iPhone camera roll but I haven’t gotten that to work. WiFi and Geo-Data collection runs the battery on both my iPhone and Camera.
The tilting display is a nice thing and the camera feels very well built. The battery grip is very much a requirement and so was the move from an 8GB SDHC card to a 64GB SDXC (Class 10) card. First, the camera only gets 350 shots per charge (400 in my tests). If I’m going on a weekend trip, I’ll run the battery down fast so the battery grip is nice to double up the charge. Second, shooting in RAW at 16 megapixels is a lot of storage and the shutter speed is limited by the card speed. If you don’t have a Class 10 high capacity SDXC card, you’re going to want to get one. Unfortunately, the camera does not have two SD slots. I’d love to have Compact Flash + SDXC but the body is just too small for that.
One final thing about the battery grip. I want to plug the camera in to the wall and charge both cards. Unfortunately, I have to use the battery charger which means I have to disconnect the battery grip to get to the 2nd battery and then charge them separately since the included charger only does one battery. A minor annoyance but if both batteries are dead, it’s going to be a lot of charging before I’m back up and running.
The photos I’ve taken so far have been impressive. Sometimes, the auto-focus doesn’t work. This is the case on the 14-40mm and 25mm lens. I’m shooting rapidly, go to a different subject, press the shutter half way down and nothing happens. It’s on S-AF (single autofocus) but switching to continuous AF doesn’t fix the problem either. I’m still troubleshooting this one.
I think the E-M1 is a very capable camera. It does need improvements but nothing that would get me to upgrade to the next model. I’m good for a few years. I just ordered a new photo bag that will allow me to store this and all of the new lenses and a new sling strap so I can easily carry this camera on my hip versus around the neck. It’s larger but not 5D or even 70D large yet the photos are on par with the 70D in my opinion. Finally, I stuck with this platform mostly because of the lenses I already had. Yet, when I grab a 70D and a 140mm lens, it’s very clear just how much smaller the 4/3 system is to Canon or Nikon. The body and lenses are much smaller and I like that. My days of looking like a tourist when doing street photography are over though. This body looks VERY professional. No more getting away with taking shots of strangers without looking creepy.
