From there you start to use the camera, and you it’s here that you see this is a top shelf product, with an insane amount of work put into it that makes the camera truly stand out.
The three inch 1 million dot touchscreen is nice, and if you get by on touching focus points to fire, you’ll find a use here, but there’s also an electronic viewfinder offering a 2.36 megapixel resolution that looks remarkably clear up close, and is as bright as many of the optical viewfinders we use on regular digital and analogue SLRs.
Over in the image performance area, we’re suitably impressed.
Images shot on the E-M1 are sharp, vibrant, and bloody fantastic to look at.
Going for our regular Botanical Gardens test walk, photos of flora and fauna up close come out excellent, and show the sort of clarity on offer from the camera.
We also grabbed a shot of a small plant bud in low light and found that in RAW, there’s a surprising lack of noise when the image is darker, though this can be visible once you start cranking the low light settings up, especially since this goes up to ISO25600, which is now becoming the standard maximum for cameras without a full-frame sensor.
Some of the extra features inside this camera are also quite neat, and add something extra to the package that few cameras get close to.
For instance, the improved WiFi features on the E-M1 (improved since the recent release of the E-P5) mean you can actually control proper manual modes, even going so far as to shoot an image in bulb with your smartphone or tablet, turning the device we all carry into a cable-less cable release.
Adding to this, a live mode will also build the photograph on screen as you’re shooting in, showing you what you’re shooting in time-lapse as you shoot it.
Those of you keen to take time-lapse photos as opposed to the time-exposure shots mentioned above will be keen to see there’s an intervalometer built into this camera, making it possible to take 999 photos in succession without needing to purchase an extra accessory.
And then there’s the new colour wheel filtration mode, which lets you change the hue and saturation of a JPEG, almost as if you’re adding a gel or filter to the lens.
This only works for regular JPEGs, though, and doesn’t cross over to art modes, which is a shame, since we’d have liked to see colour filtration work in some of the other settings.
You can make it work in the movie mode, though, provided you set the colour up on a manual mode and then jump into the video capture mode, the colour working at that point similarly to a gel would on a camera.
Interestingly, this almost seems like a hack, as you can’t turn it off from within the video mode, and will have to go back into the image mode to switch it off if you like.
