A Few Days With The Olympus E-M5 ii

The Olympus E-M5 II has been one of those cameras I struggle not to buy. I’ve had it in my Amazon checkout cart, and I’m ready to go at least thrice.

So, instead of adding to my pile of test cameras, I exercised some self-control. I rented it for a few days to do all my usual camera tests, like the E-M5 II memory card speed test and the diffraction tests, which you’ll see here.

Olympus EM5ii Street — OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Olympus E-M5 II First Impressions

I didn’t have the camera long enough for a full review, but I can give you some of my impressions. And it’s easy. I like it.

Pros

My two big winners are the camera size and the auto image stabilizer. Those two features together make for such a fun camera to walk around.

Because of the size, the camera is so incognito; it doesn’t intimidate anyone like a Canon or Nikon would, and the image stabilizer ensures that your shots are almost always free from motion blur due to camera shake.

Cons

The only downside of this camera is the image quality. It’s not bad, it’s not bad. It’s great. But you can tell it’s a micro 4/3. The difference between Full Frame and APS-C is hard to see, but you can see it when going down to Micro 4/3, and it’s usually most apparent with low light. But still, it’s good enough for almost anything.

One other little thing I didn’t like is the full articulating screens. While screens that fold up are fine (like in the Sony A7, and Fuji X-T1), I don’t like having to flip the whole thing out to change my viewing angle. It defeats the point of being a small camera when this giant LCD wing hangs off the side of it, and it is completely pointless for anything other than flipping the screen around to take pictures of yourself.

Diffraction Test

Because the camera has an intense pixel pitch (they’re cramming 16 megapixels onto a micro 4/3 sensor), it performs very poorly at higher apertures. Anything above f8 you can throw away unless you don’t mind less overall resolution. Even F8 is pretty bad. So you’re kind of stuck shooting between f2.8 and f5.6. At least on the lens I was using, the M. Zuiko 17mm f1.8 is awesome.

High Res Mode

I didn’t play around too much with the High Res mode, but it works. I’m not entirely sure how it works. I know the sensor moves around slightly to shoot several photos that it stitches together, but it must do something different with the diffraction because the image holds up a little nicer at F8, which seems to be the high-res f-stop limit. The camera won’t let you go higher.

Here is what High Res mode and Diffraction look like. F8 is still beyond the limit but still looks good. F4 is the sweet spot.

In these diffraction tests, you can see what I’m talking about with the camera being micro 4/3. The image has more chatter than the Sony A7r or the Fuji X-T1 and Lots of moiré. But that’s understandable and forgivable.

Olympus E-M5 II Conclusions

Although I don’t own this camera and didn’t spend much time with it, I like it. It was fun.

It’s such a great deal, for the price you pay and the image quality you get, you really can’t complain. If I didn’t have so many cameras lying around, I would buy this for my jack-of-all-trades camera.

Ultimately, I didn’t buy it because I was waiting for the Olympus E-M1 II. It will cost much more money, but I think I will jump into the M4/3. I want it to have better video quality, preferably 4k, with a 5-axis on-sensor image stabilizer. If the E-M1 II does all that and is released soon, it could be a game changer.

Olympus E-M5 II Sample Photos

Olympus E-M5 II With Iridient Developer 3

Because it took forever for Adobe to release an update to Lightroom that included Olympus E-M5 II Raw decoding capabilities, I ended up using Iridient Developer 3. The cool thing I discovered is that Iridient has all the Fuji Camera profiles that also work with any other camera you use. So, in these photos I could process all of them with Classic Chrome.

Cool being able to use the Fuji Film Simulators on an Olympus.