> From: Bill Barber <nsurit@xxxxxxx>
>
> I've ridden the Olympus horse for many years, starting with the OM series
> film cameras and then after a few years on the fence to the e-1, e-3 and
> finally e-5 cameras. At this point I felt Olympus had basically deserted the
> folks in the trenches
I hear you. The E-3 was going to be my last Olympus camera… then, the micro
4/3rds stuff started hitting its stride.
I wasn’t interested in anything without a viewfinder, so the PEN series was not
interesting enough to spend money on. Then the OM-D line came out, and I
watched it carefully for some time to make sure they were serious about it,
until the E-M1 Mark II came out, then I pulled the trigger, without ever having
actually held one.
I must say, I’m happy as a clam. This is the first camera to actually make me
giggle while using it, since the OM-2 did, many years ago. (My prior giggle was
when I set the camera on a tripod in a dark room and started an exposure, then
my camera-shy Mom came in the room and turned on the light, and the shutter
closed with a perfect exposure.)
> I was heavily invested in there system, both from the standpoint of bodies
> but also glass.
So was I. As I mentioned in another posting, I got rid of much of it, keeping
only the “specialty glass,” although I foolishly got rid of my fast-wides
before focal reducers became available, or I might have kept some.
In particular, E-System glass works extremely well with the OM-D E-M1 (plain,
or Mark II), because those bodies (and I think they are the only ones at this
point) can do Phase Detect Auto-Focus (PDAF), which is what the E-System used.
The combo of E lenses and OM-D bodies got a bad rap for very slow autofocus
until the E-M1.
I have five E lenses: 7-14/4 ultra-wide zoom, 11-22/2.8-3.5 pretty-wide zoom,
50/2 macro, 12-60/2.8-3.5 zoom, and 50-200/2.8-4 zoom. They all work as good
with the E-M1.2 as they did with the E-3. I’m going to part with the wide
zooms, but will keep the others for the foreseeable future.
In particular, the 50-200 is delightful, and I use it fairly often. I recently
shot a conference with it, and it was the perfect focal length and speed for
shooting the stage from the sidelines.
> Having sat on the sidelines for several years watching Sony and am close to
> pulling the trigger…
We have a German exchange student here who has a 24Mp Sony of some sort. (Don’t
know the exact model.) It seems to have some shortcomings, and sometimes he
borrows my camera for certain things.
It doesn’t seem to have a reasonable Live View mode, so he borrowed mine to do
a night-shoot class assignment. And it’s IBIS seems to be seriously less
capable, so he’s always hauling around a tripod. (I gave him a Tamron 500/8
mirror for his birthday, and in side-by-side, same scene with my OM 500/8, his
photos are blurry and mine are sharp) It also seems to be very hard on
batteries; he has a HUGE grip on the tiny camera, and I can still take more
shots than he can on a charge, while hauling less weight around.
To be fair, I don’t know what model this Sony is. I just know I wouldn’t want
one.
> Is anybody really seriously satisfied with using their e-glass with this 20
> megapixel camera?
I am laughing, and having more fun than I’ve had since the OM-System! You won’t
be sorry!
The one criticism I’ve heard is that the Oly menu system is complicated. Yes,
it is, in the way that driving a Porche is more complicated than riding a
bicycle. The “instantly available” SCP control panel makes all commonly-used
settings quick and easy, and assignable buttons and switch positions make your
favourite menu pulls accessible without crawling through a bunch of menus. In
any event, I find it well-organized and easy to navigate once you’ve used it a
bit.
> Is there any compelling reason to not go with the Sony.
Besides the experiences of our exchange student, I think the lens selection is
smaller and the prices are higher. Personally, I considered Sony at one point,
but they seem to have a “not invented here” problem. I got really turned off by
their proprietary Memory Stick (while the rest of the industry was
standardizing on SD) and on other proprietary plugs and stuff. (The E-M1.2 has
finally moved to a standard 2.5mm remote shutter control; yay!)
:::: Some days I wonder if it might not be better to culturally engineer humans
to enjoy small scale garden farming than to genetically engineer weeds to save
large scale agribusiness. -- Gene Logsdon
<http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=Gene+Logsdon>
:::: Jan Steinman, EcoReality Co-op <http://www.ecoreality.org/> ::::
--
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