Olympus OM-D E-M5 photo samples

The camera easily handles a wide variety of shooting situations from bright, high-contrast light to the relatively dim.

Lori Grunin

April 16, 2012 10:07 a.m. PT

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Dynamic range, JPEG

As far as I can tell on my mediocre laptop screen, the E-M5's JPEGs deliver a reasonable dynamic range. I don't yet know how much recoverable detail it retains in the highlights, though, as there seems to be a little more clipping in the highlights in some photos than I'd like.

Note that this image is square because I accidentally managed to switch the aspect ratio settings. That's Shawn Barnett from Imaging Resource knee deep in the snow.

(1/1600 sec, f8, ISO 200, center-weighted metering, AWB, 12mm lens)

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12mm lens

The 12mm lens is a nice, sharp lens, and you can see it delivers good midrange detail. But once again, the images look a bit oversharpened to me. That's Josh Root from photo.net pointing the camera right back at me.

(1/1600 sec, f5, ISO 200, spot metering, AWB, 12mm lens)

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Sharpness

This looks quite sharp -- borderline oversharpened, at least on my laptop display. The Olympus 45mm lens is one of my favorite Micro Four Thirds lenses, though, and great for street photography.

(1/200 sec, f4.5, ISO 200, spot metering, AWB, 45mm lens)

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Shooting speed

The E-M5 performs very well, focusing and shooting fast enough for impulsive shots.

(1/500 sec, f7.1, ISO 200, spot metering, AWB, 45mm lens)

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Continuous shooting

With a fast SD card, like the 95MB/sec SanDisk Extreme Pro I was using, the E-M5 can sustain a fast burst rate for a reasonable number of frames -- about 10 or so -- shooting raw+JPEG.

(1/320 sec, f4.6, ISO 200, spot metering, AWB, 12-50mm lens at 20mm)

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ISO 400 JPEG

I can see processing artifacts in the out-of-focus areas, though the area of focus looks okay -- at least on my mediocre laptop display.

(1/60 sec, f2.5, ISO 400, spot metering, AWB, 45mm lens)

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45mm lens bokeh

The 45mm lens renders lovely out-of-focus highlights. This is Pascal Forget of Technostérone and Salut, Bonjour!

(1/500 sec, f1.8, ISO 200, spot metering, AWB, 45mm lens)

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ISO 800, JPEG

This isn't bad for ISO 800. It retains a significant amount of detail, and the only softness you see is in conjunction with the falloff in depth-of-field. That said, this is also a close-up shot, which tends to start out sharper.

(1/80sec, f2.2, ISO 800, spot metering, AWB, 45mm lens)

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ISO 1600, JPEG

ISO 1600 shots can be quite usable. Though there's some color noise and processing artifacts at this level, you may not see them at smaller sizes. I can't tell much on my laptop display.

(1/100 sec, f1.8, ISO 1600, spot metering, AWB, 45mm lens)