Gadgetory

with the omd em5 and what this trots out another beloved film brand and updates it for the digital age the reincarnation of the OM film line targets those enthusiasts who have proven to be either Olympus loyalists or simply fans of the micro four thirds interchangeable lens standard the camera has some really outstanding qualities including a great feature set in class leading performance but I was less impressed with the photo quality than I would have liked to have been it has a modest size body built along the same lines as the e5 DSLR it's a bit tank like with the magnesium alloy body that's Dustin weather sealed and it's weather resistant from negative 4 degrees to 140 degrees the om-d takes advantage of its ancestors pyramid-shaped housing here instead of an optical viewfinder though it uses an electronic viewfinder plus it puts a hot shoe and a connector for the bundled compact flash unit overall I really enjoy shooting with the camera it's comfortable to grip and all the lenses are small enough to stash in a roomy jacket pocket if necessary the retro look deservedly attracted quite a bit of attention and several accidental drops attested to the camera sturdy build the EVF and tilting o LED touchscreen display are bright and usable screen becomes nearly invisible in direct sunlight and I always find OLEDs a little too cool and contrasting for my taste some of the buttons feel mushy and some of them are a little too small for quick and easy access plus there's no way to lock the front dial which adjusts exposure compensation without changing its function entirely one of the unique features is that you can adjust the highlight and shadow areas of the exposure compensation curve while looking in the viewfinder a little more useful is the ability to finally adjust a lot of the parameters you can customize the display in a gazillion different ways so that for the most part you only see the options you want and while the camera doesn't have a full touchscreen interface it is a touch screen so you can perform most of the operations you really want to do touch focus with magnification touch shutter and the ability to swipe to navigate during playback though the lens isn't small it does have a load of nice features including a macro setting and a quiet electronic zoom for video plus it's weather sealed and feels well built it's not the sharpest or fastest lens and it could probably use a better class of coatings but that would also make it far more expensive I mixed feelings about the photo and video quality from the camera on one hand it delivers very well rendered color and accurate consistent exposures at iso 200 the JPEGs look excellent so the camera frequently over sharpens it retains highlight detail extremely well too and bright saturated reds and Magenta's look just as they should but one stop up to iso 400 and the noise suppression kicks them for the JPEGs and it begins to blur out significant amounts of detail in places unfortunately that's normal for many of these cameras but there also seems to be a lack of dynamic range in the shadows which makes it difficult to get really good results from raw files at ISO 1600 or higher there's little detail to recover and you get a lot of noise and while I generally like the video quality from the camera that's what I'll call consumer good it's fine for shooting vacations kids and pets but it's probably not up to the standard of real video shooters the cameras quite fast in fact pretty much the fastest in its class overall the one aspect of performance I find irritating is the lag enos coming out of sleep mode I frequently had to check to ensure the power was on as I waited for the camera to wake up the burst shooting is also surprisingly robust and the EVF refreshes well enough for most continuous shooting well you don't get best in class photo quality with the omd em5 that's a small trade off for the rest of the package I'm Lori groanin and this is the olympus om-d p.m.