The new Olympus E-M1 arrived yesterday. I picked it up on the way to the office and charged the battery there. My first test of it after I got home from the office was to stick a lens on it, and drag it out to the club.
With the Panasonic/Leica Summilux-DG 25mm lens, focusing for still snaps was near instantaneous and quite accurate. Out of 200+ exposures I made, just snapping around like a tourist with an instamatic at a party, only about six were poorly focused. I left the camera on its defaults, changing only that it would capture JPEG Ln + raw and setting the ISO to 6400 and 12800, and setting it to S-AF+mf so I could play with the manual focus. Here are a few JPEG+raw pairs at what I think is somewhere around EV 0-1 light in club lighting (mostly red and purple gels). (There's also a video at ISO 6400, again made using the camera defaults; the link is right near the bottom of the page below.) https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25268645/oly-em1-low-light/index.html I'm satisfied that the E-M1 has plenty of sensitivity for my needs. It's a very fast and responsive camera in use too. It's a bit small for my hands without the HLD-7 battery grip fitted, I hope that arrives soon, but even so it was comfortable to hold and use, and all the controls work nicely. I had NO trouble focusing manually even without any focusing aids enabled, the electronic viewfinder is terrific. So is the image stabilization, best I've used. I found its defaults good enough for a quick session, I hardly used anything other than the super control panel display and the shutter release. Today I'll snap about in some more normal lighting and lower ISO settings. :-) G On Oct 9, 2013, at 11:39 PM, Godfrey DiGiorgi <[email protected]> wrote: > I have no problems getting clear hand-held shots with ASA 400 film at f/2.8, > 1/4-1/8 second, EV 3 on the chart you referenced. Without IS. > > With my G1, I find quite a number of excellent shots, even of people moving, > at light levels which, according to your chart, is ISO -1. Heck, I have some > very nice results with the older sensors in the L1 and E-1 at EV -1, 0 and 1 > too. With the E-5, with IBIS, I have some work down in the -2 to -4 range; > some of those were on client jobs. It looked great in publication ... That's > why I bought the E-5, for the extra couple of stops of sensitivity when I was > shooting events and editorial portraiture. > > I can't say what other people get with their cameras. I'm not them. But I > suspect your notion of low light and how superior the K5 might be is somewhat > arbitrary and suffers from a lack of experience with the FT/mFT cameras. They > do better than you seem to think in low light. BTW: I'm not saying the K5 is > bad, the sensor performance is actually darn good. But it's not the Holy > Grail by any means. > > (Note: I don't own any of the f/0.95 lenses. My fastest lenses are f/1.4, > most of my lenses are f/2 or f/2.8. A lot of my low light Pentax work was > done with the excellent 20-35/4 and 21/3.2 Limited.) > > I'll let you know how the E-M1 performs in "dim" light. ;-) > > G > > > On Oct 9, 2013, at 10:07 PM, Larry Colen <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Wed, Oct 09, 2013 at 08:03:42PM -0700, Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote: >>> Please define "low light" vs "dim light" for me. EV values would be useful >>> as a basis of comparison. >> >> I guess I'd say that low light is in the range where it is >> challenging to get a clear photo, hand held, even with a K-5. >> >> Looking at this chart, which only goes up to ISO 3200: >> http://www.fredparker.com/ultexp1.htm#EXPOSURE%20FACTOR%20RELATIONSHIP%20CHART%20B >> >> It looks like that's somewhere around EV -1, or EV 0, maybe as high as EV 1. >> ISO 3200, 1/8 second f/1.4 is EV -1 >> >> I'd say that dim light is in the range where it would be >> challenging to get a clear shot, hand held with one of my film cameras >> >> ISO 400, 1/30 second f/1.4 is is EV 4. >> >> It is my gut feeling that up until the current (soon to be previous) >> generation of u4/3 they were probably OK up to about EV 3. >> The current generation is probably good to EV 2, maybe 1 before things >> start getting rough. >> >> Most of my experience is based on looking at one or two other people's >> photos, so I'm not going say my figures are exact. But with the current >> generation sensors, and the faster shorter lenses available in u4/3, their >> low light ability is close to that of a K-5 thanks to the extra stop of >> speed you can get with the f/0.95 lens, and focus peaking for low light >> focus. > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
