Tag Archives: 20mm

My thoughts on the Olympus OMD E-M5

Way back in digital camera history (circa late 2008), if you wanted to have an interchangeable lens camera system that produced great image quality, your only choice was a large DSLR system by Canon, Nikon or other companies.  Enter the Micro 4/3’s system.  This was a system built from the ground up using a smaller sensor than DLSR’s and also eliminating the mirror box and pentaprism as well.  This results in a system that is markedly smaller than traditional DSLR’s.  I quickly bought into the system and hoped it would be everything I had in a big DSLR in a small compact package.  My first foray into m4/3 was with the Panasonic GF1.  While it was a great little camera, it just didn’t quite produce the image quality I was hoping for.  So I sold all the gear and kept using my Nikon D700.  Panasonic iterated numerous models over the next few years and another one caught my eye, the G3.  This had an all new 16MP sensor and the performance seemed to finally catch up to a DSLR.  I bought back into the system and soon my D700 was sitting on the shelf more and more.  While the G3 wasn’t perfect, it was good enough at the time and let me carry a small camera that I felt did not compromise on quality.  So I sold all of my Nikon gear and never looked back.  The G3 could never compete with a DSLR in terms of controls and speed of use, but I knew that eventually, a m4/3 camera would be released that would satisfy those criteria.

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