Insanely frustrating.

Part I is here.

I am quickly learning that the only solution for the truly miserable menu design in the E-M5 Mark II is to procure a baseball bat and go in search of the committee which designed this execrable excrescence.

Dial up the Menu system by hitting the Menu button on the back panel and you get this – the overlay pops up after a second instantly obscuring your menu choices.

Drill down to one of the main menu choices and it gets worse:

Where the user simply wants to scan the choices he can no longer do so and I can find no way of turning the intrusive overlay off. As a result I have to scroll through the choices each time being interrupted by this pop-up overlay. After a minute of this nonsense I am torn between the Excedrin bottle and hurling the camera against the nearest wall. Why has not a single ‘reviewer’ made mention of this? It’s different when you pay for your own gear, I guess.

It gets worse. Far worse.

Yesterday I took the Oly out for a quick shakedown having spent a solid hour configuring the camera to my shooting preferences and two hours before that reading the manual. Arriving at my destination I found that the two upper right dials, carefully programmed for aperture selection and exposure compensation had mysteriously switched to White Balance choices and ISO selection. This immediately rendered the camera useless and it took me a solid 30 minutes with the instruction manual (some misnomer – who wrote the index for this wretched creation?) on my iPad to figure it out. In the event the manual proved utterly useless and I had to resort to trial and error. By the time I had it figured out the sun had set and my photo opportunity was gone. Nice start, Olympus.

Needless to add, the manual is only available by download or on the CD provided. There’s a printed Quick Start booklet of no use to the intended purchaser of this hardware. Given that Olympus has spent a small fortune on the boxing of the body – a box you will see twice in your life, first on purchase then on sale, any rational photographer would opt for a cheap brown paper box and a proper printed manual. But no, that would be catering to the real world user.

This morning I had another go and again the settings had mysteriously changed. Where I had left the camera overnight set to single shot RAW I was getting three image HDR. Worse, there’s a purportedly simplified menu choice overview accessed by pushing the OK button on the rear and this mess looks like this – can you believe this?

Now you are meant to be able to scroll to one of these cells with one of the top right wheels and change the setting with the other, but while scrolling works, selection does not. So it’s back to the execrable excrescence to try and find the right choice there, subjected again to the obstruction and ceaseless flashing of the pop-ups.

Doubtless the magical menu choice changes result from accidental button presses by me, but if there’s no way of disabling all those buttons then I see no way this will not recur, once again rendering the camera useless barring a prolonged session with the menus and the aspirin.

I have not encountered a more poorly, cynically designed, inept and uncaring menu system in any of the dozens of digital cameras I have used and frankly, at my age, my time is simply too valuable to waste it on this sort of nonsense. Olympus either needs to recess these buttons or make a toggle in firmware to disable them once set – otherwise their users will develop suicidal tendencies after having to dive into the menu system yet again.

Of the few snaps I managed to squeeze off, most were in RAW and LR5.7 has yet to be updated to recognize the camera’s RAW files so you have to go through the tortuous process of installing Olympus Viewer 3 software from the provided CD (good luck if you have no CD reader in your Mac Book Air) and then, of course, it’s outdated and needs an upgrade. The downloader then proceeds to download everything in triplicate confirming that the same fellow who designed the camera’s menu system also worked on the processing software.

You now try to Export the file as a 16-bit TIFF and get:

But of course. By now I expected no less. So you restart the Olympus app and this time it works, coming over as an 85mb TIFF file ready for import to LR. The RAW original is 14.6MB – another good reason to use RAW (this is a common rate of file bloat, not specific to Olympus).

This sheer hell does not stop there. For some reason Olympus Viewer puts a reduced yellow frame around the image and what you export is the reduced section.

For the life of me I cannot find an option to export what I actually photographed. Here’s the exported version:

In the pawn shop. OM-D E-M5/II, 17mm Zuiko, fluorescent lighting, so the mechanical shutter was used.

Which just about does it for me. This piece of garbage goes back to B&H ASAP, (who were very nice about it, I must say), before I lose any more heart cycles trying to figure it out. The tipping point for my decision was the realization that the plethora of buttons could not be disabled (nor can those on the GX7 but they are disposed/designed/recessed so as not to be constantly triggered accidentally, suggesting someone at Panasonic actually takes pictures, not something you could accuse the Olympus designers of doing). As I am stuck with the hands and fingers passed to me by my parents I see no fix for this intractable problem.

This has been the single worst camera experience I have ever had and I urge you to avoid this poorly designed piece of hardware and buy two GX7s instead if MFT is your thing. Or, as a minimum, either rent it first or buy with return privileges, in case your experience mirrors mine.

For what it’s worth, the RAW results – well, cropped RAW->TIFF exports – show the performance of the 16mp sensor in the E-M5/II to be identical to that in the GX7 so if you think you are getting a better, newer sensor in the Olympus, you are mistaken..

A quart in a pint pot.

I just took delivery of my Mark II Olympus MFT body, my first non-Panny MFT, having been happy with the Panny G1 (superb and innovative), G3, two GX7s and an LX100 (my son’s, actually). All have been a delight to use and my current modest MFT lens complement includes the Oly 17 and 45mm f/1.8 primes, the original Panny 14-45mm kit zoom (outstanding) and the inexpensive and excellent 45-200 Panny tele zoom. An earlier MFT Olympus 9-18mm wide zoom was sold for lack of use and I have some twenty MF Nikkors, both primes and zooms which fit any of these bodies with an inexpensive adapter. Rarely used owing to the loss of EXIF data, AF and sheer excess bulk, but it will be fun to try some of the longer ones with the allegedly state-of-the-art 5 axis Optical Image Stabilizer in the OM-D body. The Panny favors in lens stabilization and while the GX7 adds In Body Image Stabilization, it is limited to two axes.

Size and weight are near identical. Compare – shark, top – friend, below.

The main reason for buying the Mark II is that I was intrigued to try a semi-pro Oly body and also to take a look at the innovative pixel shifting technology whereby Oly takes 8 images of a stationary subject in one second and melds them into one 40mp original (JPG in camera) or in a Photoshop plugin (RAW, 64mp). As my earlier piece sets forth, definition from the HD files thus produced rivals that from the current FF DSLR definition king, the Nikon D810 and unlike the Nikon results in no moir̩ on patterned subjects. These tests were conducted by the excellent Imaging Resource site. Some of their later tests suggest that the files produced rival those from the MF Pentax 645 51mp sensor! More on where Olympus is going with this exciting technology Рnot new but very much a first for MFT Рappears here.

By the way, the 8-shot function even works with studio strobes and Oly has thoughtfully included an adjustable delay setting between shots to give the flash time to recharge. Very smart. I can see a lot of museum curators junking their crazy priced Hasselblad multi image cameras with neanderthal Firewire connectivity and 20 minute processing times with wired connections only. Yes, I do know, as the head of imaging at a leading west coast museum and I have had many discussions on the subject. There is very little right with Hasselblad’s implementation and no USB2 or wi-fi for you, sucker!

Top panels could not be more different. Oly goes crazy with miniscule buttons (albeit programmable), Panny relegates less used controls to menus.

First impressions are of a tightly packed, dense body but really no better in feel than the GX7. In fact the Oly is a tad lighter, and the dumb aesthetic of a faux pentaprism hump – there is no prism so no need for a hump – a minor irritant. That Oly can be such an innovator but feel it has to kow-tow to dumb tradition mystifies me. Subjectively I would say that the GX7 feels slightly higher quality and the small built-in flash in the Panny is missing from the Oly which provides a small plug-in unit. Shame, as it will always be left at home. Oly claims splash proofing for its body. I live in California so have no way to test that.

I had taken the precaution of downloading the 177 page instruction book from Oly’s web site to mug up on the vicious learning curve most modern digital cameras involve and was frankly disgusted with the sheer amount of crap – there is no other word for it – that the maker has seen fit to load the software up with. (Other manufacturers are equally blame worthy). Let me understand this, Olympus. You are selling this as a body-only in the US – so your buyer is an advanced snapper by definition – but you feel that truly childish features like in camera processing, printing, dumb ass filters and scene modes (goodness gracious!) belong in a semi-pro camera body? Do you seriously believe that not a one of your buyers will be expert in Photoshop and Lightroom, etc. The sheer amount of this garbage, once deleted, would so simplify setup of the camera. But this is the way of the world. Useless feature bloat. Oly’s designer has hinted at a Spartan version and I would gladly pay $200 more for that. So would most users of this level of gear.

Ergonomics? Inferior to the GX7 as regards handling. There are just too many buttons all over the place. The lockable mode dial – the one with those dumb scene modes – is illogically designed. One button press releases it, another locks it. Every other maker uses a ‘press to rotate’ design and that’s how humans are coded. Oly is trying too hard to be different here, as you will always want to revert to locked, which means two presses not one. The finder image is slightly larger than in the GX7 and well rendered, plus it’s easy, with a touch on the Display button, to remove all the crap (yes, that word again) and end up with an uncluttered finder just like in the days of film cameras. There is simply no way on earth that any human can makes sense of the 50+ display icons in the finder, let alone remember what they all mean. The diopter adjuster has a good range and I have no difficulty seeing the whole image with vision glasses on. Nice.

Oly adopts the fully swivelling LCD screen from the Panny G1, superior to the GX7’s limited one axis tilt variant. Best of all you can fold it down reversed so you no longer see your thumb and nose prints on the glass. Note the thumbgrip on the Olympus body.

As usual, my comments and use will address candid snapping so comparisons with the GX7 – the best street snapper in the business – are to be expected. I have zero interest in movie modes. So the first thing to do here was to switch the already very quiet (noticeably quieter than the GX7’s) mechanical shutter to the silent electronic one, where it is truly silent, like in the GX7. All you will hear is a low level whirring as the AF kicks in on first pressure on the shutter release. Then it was a matter of a moment to switch the functions of the two dials top right, making the front one aperture in A mode (or shutter in S mode) and the rear exposure compensation. That’s how I have my GX7s set up. These dials and their positions are beautifully engineered and fall perfectly under the thumb and forefinger. Further, there’s a nice included thumb grip rear right which helps in holding the camera. No, I will not be getting the asinine external battery pack or L grip. I do not wish to go back to the bulk of a flapping mirror SLR – these accessories defeat the MFT concept of ‘small body, small lens’.

Price? A lot, for what is a hot new item. $1,100. You can pick up a new GX7 body for $550 (half the amount!) and there’s no way the Oly is worth the asking price unless you really need the 5 axis IBIS or the HD pixel shifting technology. While the Oly will fall in price, as these things do, Pannys can always be expected to depreciate faster as the maker is cursed with the image of consumer electronics from toasters to TVs, whereas Olympus is seen as a ‘serious’ snapper’s brand. The winner here is the GX7 buyer, a body which I continue to recommend unreservedly, especially with Olympus prime lenses. Neither body has 4K movie capability. For that get a Panasonic LX100 with its excellent 24-75mm Leica-designed lens.

More in Part II.