Introduction and features
The Olympus OM-D series is the perfect antidote to bloated DSLRs. These OM-D cameras are small, precise and beautifully made.
They use a Micro Four Thirds sensor with about half the area of the APS-C sensors in rival compact system cameras and digital SLRs, but any theoretical quality loss can be hard to spot in practice.
The advantage of the smaller sensor is the corresponding reduction in size of the lenses. If you want to travel light but keep the versatility of an interchangeable lens camera, then this is one way to do it.
40 millions pixels – from a 16 million pixel sensor?
So does Olympus’s 40M High Res mode really work? The answer is a resounding yes – provided the conditions are right. Olympus arranged a still life set up to show how this system works. The first requirement is a tripod; the second is a little time and patience.
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Click here to view a full-resolution version.
The 40M High Res mode is not that obvious, lurking at the end of a long, horizontal menu. You might have thought that such a headline grabbing feature would get its own spot on the mode dial. Making the exposure is straightforward – it takes around a second for the camera to shoot the eight frames that go to make the final image, and then another couple of seconds to process them.
If the camera’s undisturbed and there’s no subject movement it works brilliantly. I had a couple of shots where I was unsure what the camera was doing and half-pressed the shutter button to ‘wake it’, interrupting the process – this produced a fine checkerboard pattern in some darker areas – but this was user confusion, not a camera fault.
Other testers tried the system outdoors and found that anything moving in the frame (swans on a river,in once instance) would produce blurred results.
But that’s what you’d expect. If you’re working with a static subject (or one that can stay still for a second), Olympus’s High Res mode produces highly-detailed 40-megapixel images. Remember, this is not interpolation – the camera is moving the sensor minutely to effectively add pixels during the exposure.
Shake-free shooting
Olympus says the OM-D E-M5 has an improved version of its 5-axis image stabilization system, and had arranged a low-light portrait shoot to demonstrate its effectiveness, claiming a shutter speed improvement of up to 5 stops. It was pretty convincing although, as ever, shooting at marginal shutter speeds, with or without stabilization, does produce the occasional failure.
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Click here for a full-resolution version.
The stabilization is particularly effective for movies, though, and Finnish production company Kauas was on hand to show what it can do. Describing the 5-axis stabilization system as a ‘game changer’, they’d set up a short action movie by shooting the start and end sequences separately, then getting the assembled journalists to shoot the missing clips themselves – without tripods, gyro rigs or any other kind of camera support.
None of us were videographers, but the results were great – and the Kauas team also showed a few handheld ‘run and gun’ movie shooting techniques for exploiting the stabilization effect. The E-M5 Mark II’s movie mode is not technically ground-breaking in itself, but the 5-axis stabilization does appear to let you shoot handheld in whole new ways and still get smooth, sharp results.
Live Composites
In another demonstration, Olympus set up a ‘light-painting’ shot to show off its Live Composite feature. This is a very clever way to build long-exposure shots which captures moving lights, fireworks or even traffic trails, over a long period of time but without overexposing the background.
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It works by capturing the scene itself then adding only bright lights with subsequent exposures. Like the 40M High Res mode, this needs a selection of menu settings and a little concentration – the process has a series of steps and you need to remember where you are and what to do next.
The camera starts by shooting a ‘reference’ image (for noise reduction), then tells you it’s ready to start shooting. You press the shutter release and watch as the image builds on the screen. To stop it, you just press the shutter release again.
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This is a novel and effective way of capturing long-exposure lighting effects – you’ll need a tripod (obviously) and a little time, but it achieves results simply not possible with conventional long exposures.
Build quality and handling
This is the middle camera in Olympus’s range of three OM-D models, but the E-M5 Mark II’s features and design feel way beyond that. The original E-M5 was relatively straightforward, but the control layout in the Mark II version is more complex. This is not a camera for beginners, and you’ll need to spend some time checking out the menus and customization options to get it working the way you expect.
It tripped me up a few times on our walkaround tour, partly because I hadn’t had time to study the options properly, and partly because some of them are buried quite deep in the menus.
I found I’d taken a whole bunch of shots at f/22, for example, because I was shooting in Program AE mode and I’d accidentally turned the rear dial instead of the front dial, applying a program shift instead of the exposure compensation I’d intended.
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That was my fault, but other issues were a bit harder to resolve. I couldn’t get my camera to display a live histogram and even the Olympus experts present couldn’t get that one figured out – it turns out that I’d been accidentally pressing the depth of field preview button on the front of the body, which changed the display mode.
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I also found the camera had swapped to the ‘Low’ ISO 50 setting at one point, and that’s because I’d flicked the dial function lever on the back of the camera to the down position, which changed the function of the front dial to ISO adjustment rather than EV compensation.
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All this can be solved by reading the manual first, but if you just like to press stuff to see what happens (ahem), you’re heading for trouble because what just happened may not be obvious straight away. I’ve used and reviewed an awful lot of cameras and I can usually get up to speed very quickly – but not this time.
12-50mm kit lens
The E-M5 Mark II will normally be bundled with Olympus’s 14-50mm f/3.5-6.3 kit lens. This looks and feels quite odd – it’s long and narrow where most kit lenses are relatively short and squat – but it’s highly versatile. It’s not just the longer than usual zoom range (24-100mm in 35mm camera terms). It also has a sliding collar which switches between manual zoom, electronic zoom and macro mode.
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Click here for a full-resolution version.
The manual zoom is best for regular stills photography, but if you switch to electronic mode the zoom ring turns into a spring-loaded switch that delivers a slower but smoother zoom action which would be much better for movies.
Pressing the Macro button on the lens barrel lets you slide the collar forward to a third position where the focal length is locked but you can focus really close on small objects – much closer than the average kit lens.
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The battery life was a little disappointing – and this remains a limitation of compact system cameras in general. Olympus says the new Quick Sleep mode will extend the battery life to up to 750 shots, but I used up a full battery charge during a three-hour walkaround photo session, admittedly with a lot of image checking in playback mode, but only captured a couple of hundred shots.
Early verdict
The OM-D E-M5 Mark II is spectacular in a number of ways. For a camera so powerful, it’s amazingly small. The 40M High Res mode isn’t just a great idea, it really works. The Live Composite mode is a very clever way of shooting lights and night shots and the 5-axis image stabilization is extremely effective – especially for movies.
DSLR fans might find the E-M5 Mark II a little too small, though, and this is not a camera for beginners. It has amazing features and potential, but at the same time it demands your attention and concentration. It’s a brilliant tool for enthusiasts, experimenters and even professionals, but don’t expect one-click simplicity – at least not until you’ve taken the time to study the controls and customize them to your liking.
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