There is a new low record price on the two OMD cameras getting major firmware update soon! Here are the new US prices:
E-M1 for $999 at Amazon, Adorama, BHphoto and GetOlympus.
E-M5II for $899 at Amazon, Adorama, BHphoto and GetOlympus.
A list of all Olympus deals can be found at Amazon US and GetOlympus. Camera+Lens savings page at Amazon US.
And the Panasonic 30mm macro sells for the lowest price ever at [shoplink 56000 ebay]KenmoreCamera eBay (Click here)[/shoplink].
13 Responses
Any rumors about an Olympus announcement tomorrow?
A fair offer, for the first time in two years! I have always been a critic of the unethical behavior of Olympus who let down their customers and produced only one FT-compatible camera, at an exorbitant price. Don’t get me wrong, the E-M1 is a very good camera in many respects – but one, very important. In ISO terms it is behind even the four-times-less-expensive E-PM2! This is a shame! I have three E-PM2s and have taken thousands of pictures with them in various conditions! And some months ago I also bought the E-M1, second-hand, at a good price. Yes, the E-M1 is a very good technological achievement! But its sensor lets it down. I have used it so far with the Sigma 150mm f2.8, a great lens, no longer in production. Well, the E-M1 does the job, auto-focuses well (with minor quibbles), but only if the sun is up. Once the suns is behind the horizon, even in good light, forget taking good photos with the E-M1+ Sigma 150mm f2.8 combo! Noise sets in – as simple as that. Something that we, Olympus (and Panasonic) customers, have known only too well for years and years. Well, I have the Olympus 12-60 f2.8-3.5, Olympus 11-22 f2.8, the Sigma 30 f1.4 and some other FT lenses, I look forward to using them with the E-M1, and I am sure the E-M1 will do well. But only in good light. Well, sensors are much better now, and Olympus HAD DO mount a better (stronger in ISO terms) sensor in the E-M1! They didn’t. For this reason, I partly migrated to Pentax, bought a K-30, very happy with it. And I look forward to the Pentax FF, to be launched in spring 2016. So, which is my next move: another E-M1 or a Pentax FF? We’ll see. Now that the E-M1 is $999, if Pentax go the same route (Olympus-like) and ask an exorbitant price for the eagerly awaited Pentax FF, it may be another E-M1.
Please, go take your meds. Right now, before you do anything else.
Come on, when someone has nothing to say, he/she acts as if he/she is a psychiatrist. Too banal, too sad.
Changing camera brands or formats because of poor performance with your ancient lenses makes no sense. Sell some of those and buy newer Olympus lenses, or else just live with the limitations. If you want better low light IQ (less noise), try EM5 II with superior IBIS (slower shutter speed / lower ISO).
1. Critic is a skilled person whom writes about others art and such by explaining it.
2. Critique is not negative but positive. It isn’t about bashing and being a negative.
3. E-M1 cost $999 from the launch, that was 2 years ago. Some people just went and bought it for $1499 or more.
4. Goto The Crop Format as you don’t know what you talk about 4/3″ sensors. So get the Pentax and be happy that the 35mm sensor has always been and will always be THE Crop Format!
Olympus kept the price up as long as possible as matter of optimizing profit. That is their job. If they make a great product, the better that strategy works.
Did you have the latest firmware in your E-M1? AF with Four Thirds lenses has been significantly improved by firmware updates since the introduction of the camera..
I cannot speak for Sigma lenses (although I still might try to get hold of either a 105mm f/2.8 or 150mm f/2.8), but the Four-Thirds lenses I have available (five by Olympus and one by Panasonic) all perform quite well on my E-M1 regarding AF, definitely better than on my last DSLR, which was the E-30 (a camera I really did like, by the way). It might still be worse than the best you can get from a current Nikon or Canon DSLR, but, I would indeed be surprised if you’d find a Pentax that really does noticeably better than what I get out of my gear, but I cannot rule out that there might be a specific problem with that Sigma lens.
I do not quite understand the noise issue, though; I see noise roughly on par with other Micro Four Thirds models and even with most APS-C cameras from Sony or Fuji. Taking the extremely effective on-sensor stabilization into account, I really doubt that any APS-C system would offer a significantly better alternative for shooting with a decently fast 300mm (equiv.) focal length, especially in low light.
Thank you for the informativeness and knowledgeability in your post! Yes, I have the latest firmware and my Sigma 150 copy is perfect by all means. The E-M1 auto-focuses all FT lenses that I have (and haven’t really used yet – but checked precisely). Yes, focusing on the E-M1 is definitely much better than on the K-30, a well-registered fact. But the more powerful sensor of the K-30 helps take better pictures in lower light. As for “noise roughly on par” between mFT and APS-C, it is precisely the very fine difference between noise levels that we rely on, right? I am a tourist photographer and it is a disappointment if I have to put the camera and lens back into the bag at 5 p.m. instead of at 6 or 7. So, actually, this amounts to a BIG difference if you are in a certain spot of the world once in your life for a couple of hours! As for the 300mm focal distance, I do not use the K-30 for this purpose, I prefer the E-M1 + Sigma 150. Good long-range Pentax lenses are expensive and the 5-axis IBIS is indeed much better than the Pentax IS. Furthermore, Sigma 150 and 105 are FF lenses, and with mFT you use only their most central circle where they work at their best! Before buying the E-M1, I used the Sigma 150 on the E-PM2 – and the combo can work wonders, provided you nail the focus. But even with the VF-4 on the E-PM2, manual focusing is a drag. So now with the E-M1 I am happy. But only in good light. :-))) By the way, I have a permanent painful experience of this kind of problem, as I recently made a great buy, a new Sigma DP1 Merrill for the price of a compact! I use it in the summer and in full sunlight only. Bought it specifically for the Greek islands – perfect sunshine area for it. Operating the DP1 Merrill is an extremely boring practice, plus you have to process RAW. But the results are fab! Last sentence: if you come across a good FT copy of the Sigma 150 or 105, grab it immediately, for God’s sake!
I know what I am talking about. Whatever the lenses, they cannot overcome the limitations of the E-M1 sensor. I have the PanaLeica 25mm 1.4 and it is a great lens. Very good lenses are the Panasonic 14mm 2.5, the 20mm 1.7, the Olympus 45mm 1.8, the Sigma 60mm 2.8, and the Samyang 85mm 1.4. I have all these lenses and have used them a lot on the E-PM2, the best ISO-performing mFT camera so far. In ISO terms the E-PM2 beats the E-M1 – and from the point of view of the latter’s price, four-times more expensive, this is an unacceptable situation.
If the E-PM2 has the best iso performance, then why does it not demonstrate it in the Dpreview test shots?
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/studio-compare?utm_campaign=internal-link&utm_source=mainmenu&utm_medium=text&ref=mainmenu#baseDir=%2Freviews_data&cameraDataSubdir=boxshot&indexFileName=boxshotindex.xml&presetsFileName=boxshotpresets.xml&showDescriptions=false&headerTitle=Studio%20scene&headerSubTitle=Standard%20studio%20scene%20comparison&masterCamera=oly_epm2&masterSample=pb070014.acr&slotsCount=4&slot0Camera=oly_epm2&slot0Sample=pb070014.acr&slot0DisableCameraSelection=true&slot0DisableSampleSelection=true&slot0LinkWithMaster=true&slot1Camera=oly_em5&slot1Sample=p1010013.acr&x=-0.8350943259942705&y=-0.5334803638842283
Your comparison is not with the E-M1 but with the E-M5, the latter being more or less identical in ISO capacity to E-PM2. Strangely, the E-M1 is absent here. The DXOMark comparison gives E-PM2 ISO 932, E-M1 ISO 757: http://www.dxomark.com/Cameras/Compare/Side-by-side/Olympus-PEN-E-PM2-versus-Olympus-OM-D-E-M1___840_909
You are missing the point or are blind. The Dpreview comparison tool clearly shows the E-M5 having better high ISO performance than the E-PM2 – which is contrary to your claim that the E-PM2 has the best ISO performance of any Olympus M4/3 camera. They are not equivalent to my eyes.
Dpreview changed their comparison tool so the E-M1 can not be directly compared to the E-PM2, however, the E-M5 appears to have been retested with the new scenario, so one can compare the ISO characteristics of the E-M1 with the E-M5: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/image-comparison?attr18=daylight&attr13_0=oly_em1&attr13_1=oly_em5&attr13_2=canon_eos5dmkii&attr13_3=canon_eos5dmkii&attr15_0=raw&attr15_1=raw&attr15_2=raw&attr15_3=raw&attr16_0=3200&attr16_1=3200&attr16_2=3200&attr16_3=3200&normalization=full&widget=1&x=-0.2867216148580163&y=0.5865275237367087
Going by that, I would say they are so close to being equivalent as makes no difference, therefore, since the E-M5 is better than the E-PM2, so too must be the E-M1.
DXOmark are irrelevant.