Olympus OM-D E-M5 Review: A Classic Revived Discussion

[Jim Keenan]

Back in the mid-1970s, I became intrigued with photography and my roommate at the time had a 35mm Minolta SLR he was gracious enough to lend me to explore this newfound interest. Once I was hooked, I started examining the market for a camera of my own, and two other friends were kind enough to let me play with their cameras - a Nikon F and Olympus OM-1, respectively. The size difference could not have been more profound between the big Nikon and diminutive Olympus. Canon got into the mix as well, but when the dust settled, I went with Nikon and never looked back. Approaching 40 years later, we're all shooting digital; my Nikon D3S is still big and Olympus is still making diminutive cameras.

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[peevee]

It seems there have been some confusion regarding Noise Reduction feature on E-M5. It is NOT the same Noise Reduction on other brand's cameras (software interpolation reducing detail) - that one is called Noise Filter in Olympus. Olympus' "Noise Reduction" is in fact Dark Frame Subtraction - taking a shot with the same "shutter speed" with the shutter closed immediately after previous long-exposure shot and subtracting the values of pixels which light up due to overheating from the real shot. There is no benefit in setting it to Off other then slightly faster shot-to-shot time, which should not matter to you if you take long exposure shots (and "Auto" turns it off for short-exposure shots anyway). Although if you really need to preserve smallest detail, you might want to set Noise Filter to Off or Low - just don't forget also to turn off sharpening (by setting it to -2), otherwise sharpening will exaggerate the noise.

[Jim Keenan]

There are two noise settings on the E-M5. One is "noise reduction" with auto, on and off settings; the second is "noise filter" which allows you to choose the amount of noise reduction. I'll defer to you as to the exact process being employed since the user's manual didn't go into specifics, but whatever is going on the camera absolutely does better with "noise reduction" on for long exposure/high ISO shots.

Thanks for the info.