Photography

Picture of new camera taken with old. Lumix G.Vario 14-45mm at 45mm, F5.6, 1/10th of a sec, ISO 1600, 4000 x 3000 cropped to 1200 x 668 pixels.

I enjoy taking pictures and for my birthday, a significant double digit year, my wife bought me a new Olympus OMD E-M5 Mark 2 and she also got me a M.Zuiko  ED 14-42mm f3.5-5.6 to go with it too.

Picture of old camera taken with new.  Olympus M.Zuiko 14-42 at 42mm, F5.6, 1/10th of a sec, ISO 1600, 4608 x 3456 cropped to 1200 x 663 pixels.

For the last four and a bit years I've been using a Panasonic Lumix DMC GF-1.  When I upgraded back in 2011 it was a big thing for me, as I accounted here, which has served me well in getting me fully up to speed with the digital age.

Both are micro four thirds cameras but the Olympus is 16 megapixels while the Panasonic is only 12 megapixels.  You can compare the quality of the two close-up shots for yourselves.  However, this isn't a completely fair test to either camera because what I'd need to do is take two pictures with each, swapping the lenses around because the glass in front of a sensor can make a big difference.  I'd also want to mount both cameras on a tripod too.

Crop 950 x 730 pixels.

Cropped to 750 x 729 pixels.

However, that said, the Olympus picture of the Panasonic camera looks better, though you have to take my word on that as I'm comparing the RAW files and what you're seeing here are the cropped JPEGs.

The biggest thing about the E-M5:M2 also has the facility to have it take multiple pictures and produce a 40 megapixel shot, a feature I'm looking forward to using in the future.  It is also an order of magnitude more sophisticated than the DMC GF-1.  To such an extent that I would consider the Olympus to be a computer that takes pictures because of the programmability of the camera functions.

So tomorrow I will be testing it at PicoCon.  Expect a report with pictures soon.