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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
