After nearly four months of searching for finding a mirrorless camera replacement for my E-PL2, I finally settled for the Olympus OM-D E-M5; and picked it right up this morning at MSColor, my usual neighborhood camera store. It’s been a quite a challenge deciding between the various mirrorless compacts. Since January this year, I’d been looking at these:
Olympus E-P3; which our cell group friend Ann uses. Great build quality, very fast AF and supporting touchscreen AF, trademark Olympus color out of its JPGs, but ultimately aging sensor.
Panasonic GX1; beautiful styling, competitively-priced, better low-light performance than the E-P3.
Fujifilm X100; blogged about it here a few times already. Beautiful color output, but too quirky for me, and AF’s just too slow for Hannah.
Fujifilm X-Pro 1; too expensive; this would have cost far more than I was willing to pay.
Sony NEX-7; fantastic APS-C class sensor output, top of the line EVF, modern with all the trimmings, but comparatively larger lenses and fewer in range too.
Samsung NX200; very affordably priced, liked the build and styling, but while APS-C-sized sensor doesn’t quite handle low light as well as the NEX-7. Weird.
The Olympus OM-D E-M5 (how do they even cook up these names?!) was announced in February this year, and garnered a lot of interest immediately. It’s possibly been one of the most talked about mirrorless cameras this year, as lots of photo enthusiasts was very keen to see how Olympus was going to compete against the cameras coming out of Sony’s NEX line that make use of the larger APS-C-sized sensors and enjoying all the advantages that allow out of it. More in the next post.=)
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