Nice and not so nice.

Can you spell ‘bloat’?

The first impression of the Panny GX8 is like seeing that long lost cousin you were crazy about in high school. Ten years later you meet again and, to your poorly hidden dismay, you find she has spent unholy amounts of time at the local MacDonald’s and has grown in all the wrong places. And for all the really good things the paper specs of the GX8 bring, that first prevailing reaction is hard to shake.

The GX8 has succumbed to bloat and that’s a failing totally at variance with the MFT concept of ‘small body, small lens’.

I have yet to get my hands on one so this is from spec sheets. Let’s enumerate the exciting enhancements the GX8 brings to market:

• It exists. The fact that Panny has seen fit to continue with the ‘rangefinder’ body factor when all around still slavishly and unnecessarily copy the ‘SLR hump’ look for bodies with no glass pentaprism, is good news. The GX7 was easily the most elegant looking body put out by anyone in decades and the later fixed zoom LX100 only built on that.
• A new 20mp sensor. With MFT having been stuck on 16mp for ages, an upgrade of the original 12mp in the wonderful Panny G1, a further bump to 20mp is welcome.
• Improved EVF technology, though there’s little wrong with the EVFs in the GX7 and LX100.
• 4K movie recording – just like with the LX100.
• A socket for an external microphone for proper sound recording.
• 5-axis image stabilization with most Panny AF lenses.
• The addition of a top plate under/over-exposure dial for quick and easy adjustments, again just like the LX100. Dials always beat LCD displays.
• Enhanced weatherproofing.
• A repositioned shutter button in keeping with the more comfortable positioning on the G1/3/7.
• A fully swiveling rear LCD (or cover, if you prefer) harking back to the G1.
• Available in chrome – yippee! – not just the ugly black everyone seems to insist on and no one needs. Fat girls and ugly cameras dress in black, with the same failed, hoped-for result. They get hot and sweaty, but no slimmer.

So what’s not to like?

• Like every Cadillac on the road, it’s fat and ugly. The jeweled precision of the GX7 is gone. The handgrip design is awful to look at. Who on earth designed that monstrosity?
  
  Plane transitions brought to you by the Cadillac design team.

• It’s heavy – 17.2 ounces compared with 14.2 ounces for the GX7. 21% more for what? Might as well buy an APS-C DSLR.
• The handy pop-up flash has disappeared.
• No manual shutter speed dial as found on the LX100 – which has the best manual controls bar none.
• Enough, already, with that dumb ‘scene mode’ dial.
• The 5-axis OIS will not work with two earlier Panny lenses which I own and like immensely – the 14-45mm kit zoom (excellent in every way) and the 45-200mm long range zoom which is everything MFT is about – miniscule with 400mm FF-equivalent reach. And no Oly or Leica lens is supported. It seems that Panny will not be making firmware updates to support these lenses. In fairness, the two axis IS in the GX7 body works fine and I have no issues with the two Olympus 17mm and 45mm fixed focal length lenses I favor on my two GX7 bodies, but it’s a shame neither Oly or earlier Panny lenses are not supported fully in the GX8.
• For my avocation – street photography – neither the tilting EVF eyepiece or the swiveling LCD add any use. I’m not about to peer down into a small eyepiece or ponce about with silly LCD screens in this sort of work. Solutions for cowards.
• Despite the big increase in weight and bulk the battery is bad in two ways. You cannot use the one from the G1/G3/GX7 which is frustrating. The one used is that from the G7 and it has no meaningful gain in capacity which you would expect with 4K movie capability and the big increase in bulk the body displays.
• Price. At $1200 for the body only Panny is asking way too much. Wait a year and it will be down to $800, which seems about right.

So who should buy this body? I confess I am somewhat mystified. If you want the best movie capabilities you might as well splurge on the GH4 for $100 more and get almost everything the moviemaker needs. If you want the MFT concept defined to perfection either get a GX7, soon to be remaindered, where you will probably pay $400 for a new one. Or, if you have no need of long lenses and want a fast, wide, excellent 24-70mm Leica designed zoom, I strongly recommend the LX100 which in one package has just about everything most snappers require. New for under $700 with a crackerjack zoom lens and the small size and form factor elegance which MFT is all about.

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.

For the full frame DSLR.

One of the thrilling aspects of the just announced Olympus E-M5 Mark II MFT SLR (see previous column) is the HR mode which blends 8 images into one 40mp file, delivering the resolution of a Nikon D800/810 in a pint-sized MFT body. Olympus has downplayed the significance of this technology, and there are some practical limitations. It takes one second for this magic to happen so moving subjects will mostly not work.

But Oly is clearly not resting on its laurels and seems determined to extract a quart from its pint pot. Click the image of General Manager Setsuya Kataoka below to read about the thrilling coming enhancements in a fine DP Review interview:

Click the image.

Simply stated, Oly proposes to make this a much speedier process, delivering the blended composite in 1/125 second. The miniscule sensor movements involved are truly an engineering masterpiece.

Given that the E-M5/II sample blended images linked in the previous column are better than those from the Nikon D810 (same resolution, no moiré effects), this seems to announce the death knell of the DSLR flapping mirror behemoth and its ridiculously large and heavy optics. The warbler is about to boot the cuckoo from his nest.

Another no less exciting possibility is that of a minimalist variant without all those wretched buttons and dials.

I am on the waiting list for the E-M5/II. So what if it’s rapidly obsoleted? Oly deserves my dollars for its development effort. The genius of Maitani, the designer of the OM1, lives on at Olympus. Not since Oskar Barnack and Walter Mandler at Ernst Leitz have we seen anything like this.

Thinking outside the box.

Olympus may have committed one of the larger accounting frauds in recent years, to the tune of over-reporting income by $1.5 billion, but mercifully no such stupidity pollutes their camera design team which has generally been original and stellar in execution for decades. The Pen F brought a high quality half-frame (72 snaps on a roll of 35mm film) body with interchangeable lenses to the film world and the OM1 and successors saw Oly’s jeweled execution conferred on one of the most lovely film SLRs ever made. When they persuaded famous British bird photographer Eric Hosking to dump his heavy Zeiss Contarex gear in favor of their light and capable system, sales took off. No wonder that they have modeled the OM-D MFT DSLR range on the OM1.

When MFT digital came along both Oly and Panasonic were there from inception, rolling out a succeedingly better body seemingly annually. I went with the Panny G1 which was a groundbreaker, sold well before Oly came to market with its first MFT DSLR body. When I recently moved from a G3 to a pair of GX7s the main appeal of Panny over Oly was the availability of the silent electronic shutter in the GX7, a body which finally added IBIS, another first in the Panny line and something Oly had incorporated all along. Now I could get vibe free images at slow shutter speeds using the 17mm and 45mm Oly fixed focal length prime lenses which are excellent quality, fast, faster focusing than anything Panny sells and very compact indeed. The 17mm resides on one GX7, the 45mm on the other, and they are never removed. I also much prefer the unobtrusive ‘Leica M look’ of the GX7 over the OM-D with its intrusive and purposeless hump.

But let’s give credit where it’s due, for Oly has just announced it’s latest MFT DSLR body and it again reminds us that the mental sloths at Canon and Nikon need a good going over with with a cattle prod to wake up, smell the market and come out with FF mirrorless DSLRs in lieu of their antiquated, senseless bouncing mirror/glass prism, noisy monstrosities. Their continued complacency will see someone do this for them (Sony does not count – no credibility, like buying a Hyundai and pretending it’s German), with Fuji rumored to be working on one right now. Before they know it, Canon and Nikon will be yesterday’s news. Kodak anyone?

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, and the sensor shifting HD technology in Oly’s new body is a variation of that used by Hasselblad in its $50k HD50 body which takes multiple images, stitching them together in post, each image seeing the sensor displaced a tad so that the overlaps fix what ails digital sensors – moiré, color issues, grain. Oly does this in the E-M5 II by combining 8 images which can be processed using an included plug-in in Photoshop. True the technology – whether Hasselblad’s or Olympus’s – can only be used with stationary subjects, but check out this fine analysis by Imaging Resource, clicking through to their test chart images, and I think you will be challenged to distinguish the OM-D’s images from those taken using a 36mp Nikon D810. One easy way to spot the Oly images is by the complete absence of moiré effects in the material swatches even though the Oly sensor, like that in the D810, lacks an anti-aliasing filter. Extraordinary. Don’t waste time looking at the Sony images – the model/mount/lens range will be replaced three or more times by Christmas.

The other appealing thing is that finally an OM-D body includes a silent electronic shutter, something I use exclusively on my GX7s where it really is silent and results in far less mechanical wear than is the case with the mechanical one. (If you want a loud and slow focusing 35mm FFE lens, by all means try the execrable 20mm Panny offering – by the time it focuses your subject has crossed the nearest state boundary). The only sound you can hear when the shutter is released is that of the lens focus motor and the motors in the Oly primes I favor will be audible to you only. And by all accounts the multi-axis IBIS in the OM-D bodies is quite a bit better than that in the GX7 (not that I’m complaining) which otherwise resorts to in-lens vibration reduction, meaning Panasonic lenses only. Until the GX7 came along, the Panny user could only get vibration reduction with Panny lenses.

I don’t need the HD function of the new OM-D or any of the dozens of movie modes, but many landscape and architecture snappers will jump at the HD opportunity. Having schlepped their gear miles into the wilderness for yet another mind-numbingly inane image of Half Dome, these erstwhile mavens of the landscape world will welcome the new found lack of bulk and weight as they try yet again to imitate the famously mediocre Saint Ansel when they are not getting off arguing over hardware at LuLa. For snappers needing FF DSLR image quality from an MFT kit, the new OM-D is just the ticket.