Gadgetory

hi I'm Lori grunion from cnet and this is the Olympus om-d e-m1 the em1 is great micro four thirds camera it's gotten an entirely new 16 megapixel sensor that doesn't have one of those blurring anti-aliasing filters and it has a new combo phase detection contrast autofocus system that's designed to make shooting with the company's older four thirds lenses a lot faster that of course does require a mount adapter the magnesium alloy body is freezeproof down to 14 degrees and weather sealed and though the buttons feel a bit mushy the camera overall feels really solid and substantial with a grip big enough to make using a mid-sized four thirds lens pretty comfortable I also really like the new 12 to 40 millimeter f28 lens that Olympus made to pair with this camera and it's the first of its pro line of lenses and it has great build quality and great image quality and a manual focus cuff that you slide to enable or disable manual focus and a custom settings button the body design has some nice touches like the toggling locking mechanism on the mode dial that you don't have to hold down while you twist simultaneously and the novel interface for fast color and white balance adjustments and effects which the company dubs color creator there are tons of useful features including Wi-Fi time lapse in auto HDR along with Olympus's nice set of in camera effects and filters both the EVF and the tilting touch screen LCD are bright and contrasting and very good the camera could use a second card slot though there are a gazillion ways to program the controls many of which can also take context-sensitive settings based on this lever in fact there are so many ways to program the body it's hard to keep track if you're not using it constantly well the image quality is excellent Olympus earns my double facepalm award for its default settings out of the box fine jpg is your best option and those are pretty disappointing but there's a setting hidden in the custom menus to enable a super fine jpg given the price of this camera that should be the default and it's ridiculous that it's not even visible performance is excellent as well then I didn't get to test it with this best quality JPEG but it's fast on Raw so it should be comparable the autofocus system operates quickly and generally pretty decisively and though using the slow for thirds lenses hold it back a little it's still fast enough for most needs you can even burst it about 40 shots with full auto focus at 6.5 frames per second the one disappointment is battery life which is bane of interchangeable lens cameras thanks to power sucking lcds etfs and AF systems well it's really a great counter for the money with excellent raw photo quality host of useful features and speedy performance are you ended up docking the om-d e-m1 a point in design for its needlessly complicated configuration options and it's poor choices for defaults I'm Lord Gerin and this is the om-d e-m1