Personal View site logo
Make sure to join PV on Telegram or Facebook! Perfect to keep up with community on your smartphone.
Please, support PV!
It allows to keep PV going, with more focus towards AI, but keeping be one of the few truly independent places.
Olympus E-M5 II, camera topic
  • 350 Replies sorted by
  • @johnbrawley

    Oh thats ok then. Just as a general opinion did you enjoy working with the camera, and did you feel that the quality it gave was good enough. Not top of the line, just good enough? Im thinking about picking one of these up for shooting festivals.

  • The camera is good enough for lot's of things, but mostly if IBIS and IS is important then it will outweigh it's other shortcomings. It's a start in video for Olympus, but there's still plenty to improve on.

    JB

  • Johnbrawley, et al,

    Does Olympus license IBIS? Seems like Sony's investment / partnership with them would give them access to Olympus' tech.

  • As far as I know, the Sony IBIS is very different from Olympus - the Oly's is magnetic but assisted with springs, and the Sony's is completely electromagnetic.

  • MarcioK,

    I should have been more clear. I was trying to say that since this latest IBIS beats everything else, Sony should license it.

  • @MarcioK that notwithstanding

    Petapixel were reporting that a tech exchange is taking place where both manufacturers are seeking more modular assembly inherent to reducing costs

    and where its clearly more difficult to to enact upon a 4x heavier FF sensor than the 4/3rds model IOW SONY need the best that can be done more than Olympus do

  • @Twitherb This info about the ibis differences came from a Sony representative interview, as far as I remember; they say that the Olympus approach could have problems in the long run, since the springs starts to lose their strength, and than they decided to go full magnet.

    And Olympus knows that their IBIS is their most valueable asset, I doubt that they wouls license it to a direct competitor. :)

  • Yes, Sony is a competitor, but they are also Oly's biggest shareholder: http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/25/olympus-confirms-that-sony-is-now-its-largest-shareholder/

  • @Johnbrawley. I looked at the ibis tests you uploaded, many thanks. Do you have any 4k (eg GH4) equivalent shot you could share? I would like to see the difference between an equivalent 4k and 1080p from the Oly at its best setting?

  • some pretty bad moire...

  • OM-D E-M5 Mark II commercial

    EM5 Mark II presentation

    In the second half they play a video comparing EM5II footage with IBIS vs competitor's 4K camera which is obviously GH4. Here it is:

    So that's a sign of Olympus being concerned with 4K. Maybe they have it up the sleeve for EM1-II.

  • Maybe Olympus is rightfully concerned of 4k video because they know their 1080p+IBIS results are easily trumped by 4k-video-with-software-stabilization-in-post?

  • My concern with the last video (comparing it to the GH4) is not the stabilization - is the downright dishonesty. The GH4 images are visibly out of focus.

    But I have my doubts about "4k stabilization easily trumped"; all my tries to stabilize live concert footage with Warp Stabilizer (for example) resulted in very high distortions and artifacts caused by the lights. Maybe using pure cropping stabilization could render better results, but it must be tested properly.

  • @MarcioK: I don't have a 4K camera yet, just a GH3. But, I've found that the combination of Prodad Mercalli V4 used only for Rolling Shutter Repair (the option for Vibrations/Wobble) and then Warp Stabilizer in PP with Crop Only gives pretty good results. You can try out Mercalli V4 for free. I didn't mention it in the post on this topic I made awhile ago:

    http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/938/stabilize-footage-in-post-options#Item_62

    but I tried to get as good results only using Warp Stabilizer and the Advanced options in Warp Stabilizer including Rolling Shutter Ripple/Enhanced Reduction, but, then I wound up with Extreme cropping. There is something very good happening in Mercalli V4 related to rolling shutter repair. Mercalli is pretty slow, but, you can easily batch up a bunch of clips and export the processed clips to a new folder while you are having a coffee break. But...then add in the time spent in PP's WS, and....that's a lot of time & effort just to stabilize clips. Still, if you started with 4K, and delivered only 1080p, you should be able to stabilize and crop, and...never notice the cropped edges. Again, I don't have a 4k camera, so, don't know how well it would work. It would be nice to see some tests.

    Clearly, the YouTube video posted above is dishonest. It almost appears as if they applied a blur filter to the GH4 footage. They didn't need to bias the test with such poor out-of-focus footage from the the GH4. The IBIS in the EM5 is truly a distinct advantage, and that would have shown through even without blurring the GH4 footage. Such misleading information seems almost unethical, but, I suppose a lot of people who see that BS clip will be convinced the EM5 is a far superior camera for video...

  • What's with the 0.42x factor in the slo-mo, it says in the manual it has variable slo-mo, is it 120fps conformed to 24/25 or 30p in camera? Actually, 4k isn't there yet and the horse power required to stabilise it in post is pretty significant, hence the requirement for no end of stabilisation devices currently under development. The em-5 mk2 fits a market that is now being ignored by Panasonic and probably most others, the enthusiast/semi-pro who want excellent hybrid camera for everything, the GH1/2 was that camera and the 3 went in another direction to be fair. The EM-5 was a great camera, but the EM-5 MK2 is just off the scale.

  • My guess is that it is 60p interpreted as 24p which gives 0.40. I don't know where the 0.42 came from? Maybe a fat-finger typo?

    Ah, it is a 25p clip. So, 0.42 makes sense. 25/60=0.416.

  • Be interesting to see how far the multiplier goes? in the owners manual it doesn't really say!

  • We need Blackmagic to license this 5-axis in their next Pocket Camera.

  • BMPCC with such stabilizer will be a killer camera!

  • I actually own BMPCC, and find it great, but probably this new Olympus will make a perfect companion for my Blackmagic.

    Olympus:

    1. Has electronic shutter and long shutter speeds, which I need for timelapses.
    2. It can shoot photos using same lenses I use on my BMPCC
    3. It can back up as a good video camera, when I need video stabilization.

    I was leaning more towards Pana GX7 before, but stabilisation looks like a valuable add-on.

  • Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II has much improved video. In addition to offering multiple video frame rates and Full HD video at bit rates of up to 77 Mbps, the OM-D E-M5 Mark II 5-axis image stabilisation system makes it much easier to shoot stable footage hand-held, drastically cutting down on the setup time and the amount of different equipment required to get the shot. The Finnish video team KAUAS were on hand to demonstrate exactly what the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II can do. The new touch-sensitive, vari-angle LCD screen is also a great boon to productivity and creativity, allowing you to compose from difficult angles and focus with one touch of the screen.

    http://www.photographyblog.com/news/olympus_om_d_e_m5_mark_ii_preview/

  • Stabilizer test Sony A7II vs Olympus EM5II

  • A7 II one doesn't look stabilized at all!

  • It's as clear as water that they are subsampling the sensor. This will strongly impact resolution and DR.

    IQ is not even close to GH3/GX7 generation: http://www.dpreview.com/previews/olympus-om-d-e-m5-ii/5

    If you learn to live with that, everything else is overwhelming.

  • @duartix the em5 isnt as sharp in that test. I doubt anyone expected it to be. But to be fair we have no idea how the settings were in camera between the 2. The gh3 in that comparison could be applying more sharpening. To be honest those crops show me that the video is plenty useable. I dont ever plan on cropping that much in 1080p video. What do you think about johns videos? Curiosity looked very good to me.