Olympus OM-D E-M5 review

Olympus OM-D E-M5 review pictures

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The E-M5 isn't quite as retro-gorgeous as a device like the Fujifilm X10, but it's still seriously easy on the eyes. Its magnesium-alloy body is available in black or silver, with black synthetic leather wrapping around the center of the body on each model; having seen both, I prefer the silver, but my all-black review unit has its fair share of charm as well. At 4.8 inches wide and 1.7 inches thick (minus the lens, of course), it's quite easy to hold, though I do wish there were a slightly larger grip — there's a nice raised spot on the back for your right thumb, but the bump on the front barely registers at all. At 15 ounces, the E-M5 isn't the lightest Micro Four Thirds camera I've tested, but it's a featherweight compared to the DSLRs I typically lug around.

The front of the camera is extremely sparse: there's an Olympus logo and an OM-D logo, a lens release... and that's it. On top you'll find a handful of controls, along with the pentaprism hump that's a distinctive part of old OM cameras like the OM-1, but feels like a vestigial appendage on a mirrorless camera in 2012. The extra real estate is at least put to good use, with an electronic viewfinder, accessory port and hotshoe occupying the space, but it feels like this camera's a bit larger than it has to be for the sake of being old-looking. There's no flash built in, but the E-M5 comes with a flash accessory that plugs into the hotshoe and accessory port — it's a good flash, too, bright and more diffuse than I expected, plus all you have to do to activate it is tilt it upward.

Underneath the viewfinder is the 3-inch LCD (more on both of those down below), and a few more buttons and controls. Weather-sealed flaps on the right side cover Micro USB and Micro HDMI ports; the battery door and tripod mount rest on the bottom, and there's a single SD card slot on the right side. Everything's a little more difficult to access than I'd like thanks to the weather-proofing (you have to tilt the screen out before you can access the HDMI and USB ports), but I'll gladly take that in exchange for not having to fear using the camera in a bit of rain.

Since Micro Four Thirds cameras don't have a mirror, they also don't have optical viewfinders. So Olympus added a 1.44-million-dot electronic viewfinder to the E-M5, and as EVFs go it's a pretty good one. The tradeoffs with an EVF are almost always the same: you get lots of information on the viewfinder itself, but you don't get as accurate a look at what you're shooting. An EVF's refresh rate also means you'll get blur and ghosting if you move the camera quickly, and on the E-M5 I also saw violent exposure shifts as the camera caught up to what it was looking at. EVF's are fine, and I'm glad Olympus included one here rather than foresaking viewfinders altogether, but make sure you can live without an OVF before you buy the E-M5.

The 3-inch LCD, on the other hand, is good by any standard. It's filled with only 610,000 dots, so in theory it's not as sharp as the 921,000-dot screens on the NEX-7 and other cameras, but I can't say I noticed the difference. The LCD's colors were incredibly accurate — more so than the viewfinder — and viewing angles are fantastic, meaning there's virtually no way you can hold the camera and not be able to see the display. That's made even more true by the fact that the LCD tilts almost 180 degrees up and down, so you can flip it out and frame a shot even while holding the camera above your head or down at your waist.

Micro Four Thirds camera manufacturers pride themselves on having tiny lenses for their cameras, and the E-M5's two kit lens options are no exception: both would fit easily inside a fun-sized can of Pringles (I know this for a fact). One is a 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 II R lens, which costs $1,099.99 with the body, or for $1,299.99 you get the higher-end, weather-sealed 12-50mm f/3.5-6.3 EZ lens. I tested the E-M5 with the latter, and really liked it. It's incredibly smooth and sharp, and by moving the zoom ring forward or backward into one of three spots, you can enable manual zoom, electronic zoom (where you rock the zoom ring and it zooms automatically), or macro mode. I preferred the electronic zoom, which felt smoother when recording video. It makes the camera feel even smaller and lighter, and it's pretty good glass at the same time.

With some initial setup, you can control the E-M5 almost as capably as a DSLR — its control system isn't quite as good as the Sony NEX-7, but it's close. There are two scroll wheels on top of the camera, which control different things depending on the mode you're in, but are fairly straightforward. There are also two function buttons in reach of your thumb or index finger; by default, one is set to control ISO in manual mode, which I love, but of course they're customizable. The buttons themselves are a little sticky and cheap-feeling, and the wheels can be hard to turn accurately — I'd frequently want to change shutter speed one stop and accidentally go three or four — but I got used to the quirks pretty quickly and was shooting smoothly in no time. There aren't as many buttons as I might like, especially for things like bracketing, but that's part of the tradeoff when you're buying a Micro Four Thirds camera.

The on-screen interface is par for the camera course: lots of light text on dark backgrounds and semi-inscrutable icons leading you around. You'll mostly navigate with buttons, since the touchscreen interface is pretty basic — in Auto mode, you can change things like brightness and saturation using an on-screen slider, but that's about it. You can also tap on a portion of the screen and the E-M5 will snap a photo, though I didn't use that much. The menus are long and deep, so you won't want to spend a lot of time tweaking bracketing or EVF settings — this is a camera you set up, and just shoot with.

The touchscreen is more useful when you're reviewing your photos, since you can swipe through your photos, or zoom and pan around them. It's not the most fluid of interfaces — photos jerk a bit as you zoom in and out, and even the slightest tap swipes to the next photo — but it's definitely better for this purpose than a non-touchscreen.

Olympus has jumped full-on into the Instagram craze, and bundles a dozen or so filters into the E-M5, under the Art section on the mode dial. They're all Instagram-y filters, too, from Grainy Film to Dramatic Tone to Pop Art. They're fun and gimmicky, but use with caution — the camera doesn't store an original copy of your photo, only the filtered image. There's one called Art BKT, though, which shoots one photo and then saves it with every filter plus one unfiltered shot, so you can decide later which (if any) you want to use.

There are a bunch of standard scene settings, too, which tweak your camera's settings to shoot better portraits, or better at night. Panorama and HDR both work as advertised, too — pretty much anything you want to do with your photos, you can.