The Olympus E-M10 is back in Stock via third party resellers like Ritz Camera at Amazon US (Click here).
Did you ever wonder if the E-M10 has or has not an Anti Aliasing filter? Well Moonlight Knight tried to get an answer by contacting four different Olympus employess:
– Olympus Japan
– Olympus Hong Kong
– Olympus USA
– Olympus Europe
You would think they would all give you the correct answer but this is not what happened! Moonlight Knight writes:
Olympus USA did not give me a reply even after a week. The other three offices gave me a reply reasonably quickly, but I got three different answers!
Answer 1: “E-M10 sensor has AA filter.”
Answer 2: “As for today we have no information about low-pass filters used on E-M10 sensor.”
Answer 3: “The E-M10 is a low-pass filter less product.” (He referred me to the specifications, which said TruePic VII is optimized for low-pass filter less sensor. I know that E-M10 uses TruePic VII, but I don’t think it logically implies E-M10 must have no AA filter.)
Lol 🙂
48 Responses
STUPID OLYMPUS.
Olympus’ support is horrible. They never reply or just blow you off.
Well, their technical support is one of the best in my opinion.
I have had very good experiences with customer service and two warranty repairs.
Answer tailored to what they think you want. They think you want AA filter they say it has AA filter. They think you don’t want AA filter they say it don’t have AA filter. If they not answer you, they can’t tell what you want.
Speak with forked tongue.
No, it is very Japanese…
Not get straight answer in general. Keep everybody like mushroom, in the dark and covered with crap, pervasive in business world nowadays.
Also Sony is making a mess on its website. SAR started a game to find those mistakes. 🙂
Why does it matter…. It’s pixel-sharp with the right lens, as was the E-M5. If it has an AA filter, it has no big effect on sharpness…So the perfect trade off.
What matter is to get correct answer when asking question! Who want to be fed bison cookies?
True, but it is a stupid question in the first place. Looking at the pictures it produces is safe to assume it has no low-pass filter. The negative effect of having no AA filter is corrected in other software/handware.
As Olympus says : “TruePic VII is optimized for low-pass filter less sensor”.
TruePic VII is used in E-M1 en E-M10, and it would be pretty strange to combine an AA sensor and a processor not optimized for that together.
“The negative effect of having no AA filter is corrected in other software/handware.”
Strictly speaking, this is impossible. The artifacts induced by the lack of an AA filter are inherently indistinguishable from true picture information. The SW may have heuristics for detecting some particularly annoying shapes, but these are bound to not match in some cases where they should and, vice versa, to match in some cases where they shouldn’t.
Very true, thank you. I should have used the word “minimized” in stead of “corrected”.
“The artifacts induced by the lack of an AA filter are inherently indistinguishable from true picture information.”
That’s actually not quite accurate. It’s not that the E-M1 has no physical/optical anti-aliasing capability, it’s that it lacks an AA filter *over* the sensor. Instead it can use a combination of software and sensor vibration to simulate one.
Also, aliasing can be reduced greatly during Bayer processing. It is not possible to produce a perfect anti-aliasing filter optically either, so as long as it’s as good as an optical one, the implementation is a moot point.
It not stupid but simple question. Ever consider question was asked to see who would say what?
Practically speaking, since the E-M10 uses the same sensor as the E-M5, and not the sensor from the Panasonic-made E-M1, it makes sense if it uses the same lightly applied AA filter like the E-M5. That said, Olympus customer service doesn’t know what it’s talking about.
This article could just as well have said, “Does the E-M10 have a fresnic freen modulator, or not?” People would form opinions and get passionate about them — even though there’s no such thing as a “fresnic freen modulator.”
Seriously, why would you care? Either the E-M10 makes pictures with the sharpness and detail you want, or it doesn’t. If it does, you don’t need to care whether it has a low-pass filter or not. If it doesn’t, you can’t know whether that’s caused by a low-pass filter or something else. If it has a low-pass filter and you wish it didn’t, you can’t remove it, and if it doesn’t and you wish it did, you can’t add one.
Thanks for explaining to me what I need. It’s been so helpful.
Maybe I interested in technical detail. Not for you to decide what important or interesting to me.
Besides an interest in photography, some of us also have an interest in technology. What’s wrong with that?
If I use a device of any kind, I want to know how it works, what’s inside it, who made what component, and so on.
Don’t be silly — *of course* the E-M10 has a fresnic freen modulator. It’s right next to the flux capacitor.
I told you, didn’t I!
They simply don’t know what they are doing – in many respects!
They had to make a DSLR with the new sensor and stabilization. They didn’t, although they were asked hundreds of thousands of times!
Then they could at least make a new serious m43. They made it, it accommodates 43 glass. Great! Soon, it turned out it (E-M1) does not even have the new sensor, hence low ISO capacity!?!?
Next senseless and incongruous move?
If they really said “low-pass filter less sensor” (with that hyphenation) then there is no inconsistency: It has an AA filter – yet no sensor… 😉
E-M1 does have a new sensor, in fact newer than the one in E-M5 and E-M10. It’s just that it’s made by Panasonic instead of Sony. And frankly, the difference between them, and between those and the sensor in GX7/GM1, is mostly of academic interest. In real world shooting, and for normal printing/display purposes, all the latest 16 MP sensors perform similarly.
No common-sense comments, please. We don’t do that around here.
Answer 2 means the same as the answer from Olympus USA – they don’t know.
A question like this shouldn’t exist. All technical specifications about a product should be clear and evident by the company so the customer would know exactly what he gets with his money. I love Olympus but this is a fail…
If you actually can’t figure out whether or not it has an AA filter, why do you care?
Exactly. It nobody can even tell if it has one or not, then it must not be the giant hand-wringing deal people make it out to be.
You just missed my point.
You want to know a technical specification that makes little to no difference in the performance of the camera? And you’re using the lack of availability of this basically meaningless technical specification to deride Olympus?
Is that not your point?
The subtext to me is that you’re easily fooled into putting value into meaningless numbers. You sound like a good customer. If I were a camera marketer I would want as many like you as I could get.
I am just stating an obvious thing. I want to know what i am buying regardless of its significance and the company must provide the necessary information, its that simple. I am truly sorry if you cannot grasp the idea. To the rest of your comment i wont dignify it with an answer.
Exactly. Time to move on people….
Maybe it has one – but optimized in software, in their JPEG engine. 😉
Using the DP Review studio comparison tool, keeping in mind I have no real idea what to look for, it seems like the EM 10 might have the filter based on the rendition of the Kings hair which is similar to that of the Fuji A1:
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/image-comparison?attr18=daylight&attr13_0=oly_em1&attr13_1=oly_em10&attr13_2=fujifilm_xa1&attr13_3=oly_em5&attr15_0=raw&attr15_1=raw&attr15_2=raw&attr15_3=raw&attr16_0=100&attr16_1=100&attr16_2=200&attr16_3=200&normalization=full&widget=1&x=0.4898411233436612&y=0.9663089494929608
Perhaps someone who knows better wants to take a look.
Good catch. The rendering looks identical to the E-M5 and different from the E-M1.
Actually, look at the resolution wedge. Both E-M1 and E-M10 start having some color artifact around 15, with obvious at 16, while E-M5 has some weak artifacts only at 17, with obvious only by 20 or so.
One thing is for sure…..It does have a tiny sensor….
Troll.
…and you have a tiny johnson, Seizure.
Chris, you are repeating the same (obvious) thing..
LOL love to see the nerds get angry over your jokes – which are true by the way.
Olympus staff seems to be poorly trained in general. At an E-M10 handling event (Hamburg, Germany) the Olympus guy (not a short-term hired guy) couldn’t even tell me how to do exposure comp. He even told me there is no things as auto-iso in M because “it doesn’t make sense”.
As to why it matters:
Think about why all other bayer sensor 16mp sensors have AA filters (with Fuji being the exception with X-Trans). It’s because it doesn’t work. Browse random samples from the E-M10 and you’ll regularly see moire in patterned stuff like buildings.
Imo it’s ok to have an AA-less camera aimed at non-professionals but for a pro camera which should be reliable under all circumstances, the choice to remove the AA doesn’t really make any sense.
Ricoh GR does not have AA filter either – and with a single prime lens and bigger pixels, it is actually much more susceptible to aliasing than E-M10 with, say, 14-42 or 14-42EZ which are most likely to be used on it, being kit lenses. Or 17/2.8, being appropriately small too.
Asking Olympus USA the question is like talking to the tail end of the dog. You need to talk to the head – someone from Olympus japan. Head wags tail.
Should have ask chief Terada. He have brilliant answer: “Maybe, maybe not.”
Hi, does anyone had issue with their E-M10 clicking and freezing up? It happened to me twice, you can feel the clicking/vibrating of Image Stabilization then the camera will freeze, I have to turn it on and off several times before i can re-use the camera again. Any idea what’s going on?
Thanks.