I've been looking to upgrade my 11 year-old Olympus EM-5 (the original).
It's served me well, albeit with some shutter shock and delay issues
that have frustrated me. My mindset breakthrough came when I realized
that the EM-1 series is actually almost the same weight as my EM-5 with
an external grip added. I needed that grip, because the EM-5 is
otherwise too small for my big hands. The EM-1's built-in grip is just
big enough as-is.
Nearby Kenmore Camera had several EM-1 Mark II bodies for $499. After
trying them in the store, I came home with one. It appears well taken
care of. 31,500 shutter actuations, which leaves plenty left on the
rated 200,000. (My EM-5 has accumulated 13,000 clicks in 11 years).
So far, I've found nothing wrong, and I'm happy. This is a case of
staying a little behind the curve and saving quite a bit of cash. The
newer EM-1/OM-1 versions are 4x more expensive, and to my mind, the
improvements are incremental, not game-changing for how I photograph.
RAW image quality has not changed much. And when I want full-frame, I
still have my Brand L German rangefinder.
The one drawback is the mind-boggling complexity of the EM-1 setup.
Everything is customizable to a bewildering degree. (I remember
initially going through the same thing with my EM-5, until I achieved a
state of "set it and forget it." The EM-1 II is like that, only more so.
It's like "Fizbin," the card game in the Chicago gangsters episode of
the original "Star Trek." Function X does Y, except on Tuesday. But when
you also enable Function A, Function X does B, except at night.
Fortunately, the EM-1 II has dedicated buttons for almost everything I
normally do, so there's less menu diving than on the EM-5.
My general rule is to leave the factory defaults alone, unless I really
need to change them for how I photograph. So I've left all the buttons
at their default, except for the orange video record button. Since I
don't do video, I've changed that to turn on focus magnification, for
when I use my manual focus Oly and Leica tele lenses.
One huge help has been this link:
<http://wrotniak.net/photo/m43/em1.2-sett.html>
It explains things better than the manual. And when his writing gets
sarcastic, you know that the option being discussed is not all that
important for most people.
--Peter
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