The micro four-thirds, m4/3 or MFT for short, system is increasingly popular. And of course, in the beginning of this year, the MFT-bug bit me too. For my needs, I figured an Olympus PEN E-PM2 would just be the apparatus to have. After some months, there is nothing that I would regret about this purchase! I love its point & shoot appearance and the silver color, pretending to be a somewhat lower end pocket camera, in particular with one of the body-cap-lenses fitted.
The regular reader of this blog might have seen some pinhole, body-cap-lens and other experiments coming along, which not only create interesting results, but also provide me with a lot of photo fun, which, of course, is why I am busy with photography in the first place.
Right, the title says Body Shopping... and this is exactly what I did today! Yep, I bought a second m4/3 body.
It was always one of my plans, once that I liked the E-PM2, to add some more advanced features.
My considerations were going back and forth between Panasonic and Olympus. In terms of models, that would have been the GH3 or GX7 on the Panasonic side of the game and the E-M10 or E-M5 in the Olympus quarters.
This pre-selection was mainly triggered by the availability of controls and the presence of an electronic view-finder.
In terms of pricing, any of the above mentioned camerast are all pretty close, however, concerning features, anyone of said cameras provides a set none of the of the others comprise.
I got a portrait grip for my DSLR, which I like a lot, both actually, the DSLR and of course the portrait grip. Not only does the grip add battery-life and also prevents "The Broken Chicken Wing".
The option of having a grip with an extra shutter release button for vertical shooting removed the GX7 and the E-M10 from the short-list. While there is no additional grip for the GX7, the grip available for the E-M10 does neither have an additional battery, nor and extra shutter release button.
Going into the third selection round, one camera fell off. Owning a decent collection of legacy glass, in-body image stabilization seems a good thing to have, thereby eliminating the GH3 from the short-list.
Not so fast, I hear you screaming, what about the E-M10, having IBIS?! And there is one feature, speaking of legacy glass, the E-M10 has an advantage over any of the bodies on the list: focus peaking.
Is it a fight between the E-M10 and the E-M5 now? Focus peaking vs. battery grip?
To be honest, this had me thinking for a while. In particular since the pricing of the two bodies is very close these days. It seems that other features of the E-M10 attracted a lot of buyers, while the 2 year old E-M5 appears outdated to many.
Speaking of the E-M10's additional features, most seem really interesting for most folks, e.g. WiFi, HDR and other things of this nature. I like such features too, however, Samsung NX300, which I won recently, can connect to WiFi and do some tricks on tablet PCs, however, after having tested these facilities, I never actually used those in real photo-life. Concerning HDR, which I use occasionally, I prefer to have full control and rather create the final image manually.
Hence, the battle is between the battery grip with shutter release in verticals against focus peaking (for legacy glass)... or is it?!
This video partially pulled me over to the original OM-D, the E-M5: Pseudo Focus Peaking with the OM-D (a similar trick works for the Olympus PEN E-PM2, will write this up later, stay tuned!).
The final push was that a photo store next town (Rotterdam) offered a free Olympus HLD-6 battery grip to any OM-D E-M5.
=> The decision was taken! I reserved an Olympus OM-D E-M5 body for pick-up for €799.
And now things to really interesting and exciting! When I arrived at the shop, the very friendly employee (big cheers!!!) told me that the camera, when bought in the store, was €699.- only and offered me to sell it to me for this price, despite the earlier commitment from my side. Wow, that's what I call service... thumbs up (FOKA)!
Concluding, not only have a gotten all the features I was looking for, thanks to Amin Sabet, but also got a great deal on the camera (-€100) and a free HLD-6 (worth €200+). Wow! What a day!
The Gods of photography blessed me today!
Big THANKS to the Gods and FOKA!
