This is a historical document, a blow-by-blow work in progress describing my experience,
likes and dislikes of the Olympus OM-D E-M1 that I received on 3 December 2013. There's
more in my diary, starting on 3 December 2013. I last updated
this page in December 2013.
Likes
There's a lot to like about the E-M1. Here are things as I find them:
The viewfinder. It's nice and bright, much bigger than other modern cameras, though
still not as big as on my Asahi
Pentax “Spotmatic”. I'm expecting great things of it once I understand
how to steer it.
The image stabilization. This photo does show some camera shake, but it was taken
hand-held without any attempt at stabilization, and the shutter speed was
4 seconds:
Some of the new features are an advance, but they're not as good as they could be.
802.11 (“WiFi”) “networking” support.
Yes, the camera really does support 802.11, but in a manner that hasn't been well
thought out. It certainly doesn't
do Computer_network: it
establishes a point-to-point connection only with OI.Share running on a smart phone or a tablet. To do so, it first disables the tablet's
networking, so it can really only communicate with the tablet. This makes it
impossible to use the tablet for many applications as long as OI.Share is running, and
it also makes it impractical to copy files to a computer using the app.
On the other hand, it does allow significant control of the camera from the tablet,
though the viewfinder image is so low-resolution that there are many situations where
it's completely inadequate—even after switching from “fast” to “high quality”. Here
first “fast”, then “high quality”:
It's not clear why this is so bad. Typical modern 802.11n devices run at up to 300
Mb/s, which should be more than enough to display a 1280x800 image in real time.
Dislikes
One of the reasons I bought the camera was for its claimed lightning-fast autofocus,
even for Four Thirds lenses.
It's certainly true for micro
Four Thirds lenses, my current experience doesn't bear that out for Four Thirds
lenses as soon as the lighting level drops. I'm still experimenting with this one, and
the experience is based on the original 1.0 firmware level. Firmware 1.1 has already been released, and it claims “Improved AF operation”, but first I want to
experiment.
The tripod mount is offset from the optical axis by about 12 mm. Not the end of the
world, but why did they do that?
The bottom line: I'm happy with the camera, and I'm glad I bought one.
backlight when transferring data
monitor swivel
Touch screen yes/no.
