18 June 2014

Olympus OM-D E-M5

A friend of mine asked me about my travel camera, an Olympus OM-D E-M5, as he is looking at buying one. Cue me going through the blog to pull out some of the images I've uploaded and what I've said about the it before.

It's a brilliant camera and *almost* the perfect travel camera.  I say almost - it needs a built-in GPS sensor to geo-tag photos to make it perfect.  A GPS would have reduced battery life and Olympus had to make a trade - I just wish they'd put one in and let the user choose when to enable it.
Not having GPS tagged pictures makes for looking what you've shot and wishing you knew exactly where they were taken - see the other pictures from the salt flats for details (day 1, day 2, day 3 and the sunrise of day 4).

The camera is small enough to carry anywhere, but big enough to be a "proper" camera.  It feels very good in the hand and the image quality is stunning.  The low-light images from it show more than my eye can see at the time.
It doesn't look like a pro camera - unlike my Canon 7D - if anything looks like an old camera, which is useful in some places as it may prevent, or at least reduce, questions.  It does, however, give you a lot of what you get in something like the 7D - enough that I never once questioned my decision not to take the 7D. Although I wished on many many occasions that I'd got different lenses with me - something ever single photographer will recognise. As with everything else, a trade.

In summary: if you are looking for a very good travel camera, or just a very good camera, the Olympus OM-D E-M5 is worth a very serious look.