I've been very fortunate to have had the Olympus OMD E-M1 (not once, but twice) camera loaned to me to put through my regular sessions of abuse, firstly i should put it out there that I'm big DSLR guy. for obvious reasons, however this isn't an article comparing the two formats, this is purely about our praise for the E-M1, and after 3 months of shooting regularly with the camera, putting it through it's paces, all i can say is i am beyond impressed, i have always been a huge fan of the Olympus micro four thirds system having owned a Pen Mini EPM1 since release, and this only strengthens our belief of it being the superior mirrorless camera on the market, not only does it out perform it's rivals in almost every case, it's the only mirrorless camera that balances size, performance and overall quality in a neat little package, any smaller and I'd call it a pocket rocket.
Now to the technical aspects for all your nerds out there, the camera as most would already know has a 16 megapixel, Live-mos micro four thirds sensor with a total output of 4608 x 3456 pixels, it also has it's Anti-Aliasing/Optical Low-pass filter removed giving it that extra edge in resolving those tiny details, and honestly with my line of photography it only helped resolve images more clearly, with a native ISO range of 200-25600 (expandable to ISO 100) it can handle a fairly broad range of lighting conditions, this past month I've put it to our ultimate test, photographing fashion runway, initially i was intending for it only to be what we call a "B Camera" photographing only the extras and important imagery, however after choosing to temporarily retire my Nikon's and Canon's i picked up the EM1 along with the M.Zuiko 40-150mm f/2.8 Pro lens (which equates to 80-300mm) and that's when i was truly impressed, the Camera had no trouble tracking the models walking down the catwalk, going off centre and such, keeping perfect focus on their faces, and the 10 frames per second kept up with their fast paced strutting, out of 10 frames fired, it only missed 3, when compared to a colleague i know that was shooting with the fabled resolution monster the Sony A7R mark 2 which missed 6 of 10 frames, not to mention the fact that the resolution of that camera was enough to fully load his hard drive in a matter of hours,
as i mentioned previously it's the only mirrorless camera currently available that in my opinion has found the perfect balance in performance and size. i have quite large hands and having the battery grip attached only made handling the camera more comfortable, much is left to be desired when holding other mirrorless cameras, it provides almost DSLR performance and comfort, while retaining an overall smaller footprint, it certainly can kept up with my Nikon cameras in regards to battery life, I've always applauded Nikon for having the superior battery life of any dslr brands I've ever used, averaging 2000-2500 shots on a single charge on my D700 + ENEL3e and 1500-2000 shots on my D800E & D810, while they provide a more traditional and tested system, the OMD kept up fairly well hitting a total of 1980 frames before needing to be charged up again, or in my case swapping to the spare battery, that is beyond any other mirrorless camera on the market from personal experience which on average is roughly 200-600 photos per charge maximum.
my biggest testing ground for cameras has always been Fashion runway events, more particularly Fashion Week, i've taken Fuji's, Sony's & a plethora of DSLR's but nothing so far has stood up to my trusty workhorses (D3s, D4s, D700 & D810) in terms of overall performance and battery life. for all intents and purposes shooting an event like Fashion Week is like shooting 10 or more games of Soccer (football) in various lighting conditions each day for 5-6 days straight, and simply put.. the OMD E-M1 is the only mirrorless camera that has stood this test in my honest opinion)
the bottom line is, this is currently the only true workhorse camera in the mirrorless camera segment, and when paired with the correct lenses it will easily give any pro DSLR a run for it's money.
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signing out.
Ichiro.
The E-M1 on the runway