Price? Image quality??

a higher price may not get you higher image quality, but there is something else that it gets you: status.

spending more money will get you more social capital. that's why leicas, contaxes, hasselblads, rolleiflexes, and various other examples of expensive gear make such good instagram fodder.




This is it, really. Quality of results- if the object has been marketed as a "tool" of some kind- is a red herring. After all, you can carry a few items in a plastic bag just as easily as in a $20,000 hand bag. So, function of course does have its place but it doesn't need to be better. It helps if the object is beautiful to look at and use.

The social capital of having the perception of being one step ahead, having specialist knowledge, the wealth to procure, and the leisure time to use, is an important, and exploitable, aspect of human relations.





Summed up nicely by Thorsten Veblen, over a century a go.
 
Thanks Chris, your real life experience with this emerging technology is worth more than all the advertising blurbs.
On the one hand, m4:3 appeals to me for the small size and short register distance. I'm of the "If I can mount it, I'll shoot it" school of fooling around with cameras. But it sounds like manual focus is problematic with electronic vf's, which sort of negates the advantage of being able to adapt any oddball lens I happen to come by. I'm sure
Olympus's modern m4:3 AF lenses are excellent but I'm a hobbyist and a cheapskate and don't want to pay the price of admission.

I also use a EM10 Mkii (same evf as the PenF) and as Chris mentioned mf can only be nailed with the magnifier mode. Just like the add on EVF for the Leica M camera!
I bought some adapters for the EM10 as I thought it would be fun to use my existing lenses, but the harsh reality is that the AF lenses work so much better. They are extremely sharp, focus perfectly and make for a seamless experience. The adapted lenses lose their native focal length eg a 50mm lens acts as a 100mm lens due to the crop, and are just fiddly to use. Very difficult to shoot w/ adapted wides, because once adapted they are no longer wides! Even my 18mm lens becomes a 36mm lens..
 
.... the harsh reality is that the AF lenses work so much better. They are extremely sharp, focus perfectly and make for a seamless experience. .....

Sad, but sometimes reality bites.....:bang::bang::bang:

Image quality is more than just sharpness these days. I think with PS and a bit of time, many of the other aspects can get adjusted to taste. While you can adjust sharpness in the computer to a point, you run out of headroom to adjust quicker than other aspects.

More money gets you more features that might be important to getting a great type of picture.

B2 :)->
 
They are not just sharp. The Oly 25 1.8 has beautiful rendering too. The moment I use it I realized that it was just perfect with the camera, much preferable to adapting my Leica glass.
 
In January 2009, I bought my Canon 5D Mark II. Iit was a state of the art full frame camera with what Canon said was the best image quality of their lineup at the time.

One year later, I bought the Leica M9 for 2.5x the cost of the 5D Mark II, and it absolutely blew the doors off it. I was constantly amazed at how rich, sharp and 'deep' the images of the M9 looked in comparison with the 5D.

Having said that, the lenses were also an important factor. The main lenses I used with the Canon were the 24-105L and 35L, neither of which are known for their sharpness. I bought the 70-200 f4L and 16-35L later, and while they are very decent lenses, they still didn't have the oomph of the Zeiss 21mm Biogon or 75mm Summarit.

In many ways, I prefer the images of my tiny m43 cameras like the Panasonic GH3, GH4, GX85 and GM1 to the 5D Mark II. The Panasonic f2.8 zooms and Olympus f1.8 primes are extremely usable, especially the Olympus primes. Their image quality isn't as good as the M9, but they are far smaller, lighter, more flexible and less expensive to replace.

These days, I'm sure that a Nikon Z6 or Sony A7 III has better image quality than the M9, and a 2.5x the cost, but the are still more bulky in terms of lenses and overall shape. Not to mention the upcoming Panasonic S1, which promises to be slightly bigger and heavier than my Canon 5D Mark II from 2009.
 
They are not just sharp. The Oly 25 1.8 has beautiful rendering too. The moment I use it I realized that it was just perfect with the camera, much preferable to adapting my Leica glass.


The Olympus f1.8 primes, especially the 25, 45 and 75, are ridiculously good for the price, and even without factoring price. I love the way the 25 renders, and some of my favourite images have been taken with it.


The Olympus 17/1.8 and 12/2 are pretty decent, too, although not quite the same awesomeness of the 25, 45 and 75.
 
The Olympus f1.8 primes, especially the 25, 45 and 75, are ridiculously good for the price, and even without factoring price. I love the way the 25 renders, and some of my favourite images have been taken with it.


The Olympus 17/1.8 and 12/2 are pretty decent, too, although not quite the same awesomeness of the 25, 45 and 75.

Wow !

I see what you mean now.

That Olympus 25mm f1.8 lens is very bokehlicious !



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeXHy0JHIFs
 
These images show why I find micro four thirds perfectly acceptable for everyday photography and for certain kinds of paid work. The cost of this kit is minimal compared with any Leica setup. The image quality isn't up to the standards of the TL/CL or M, but is fine enough.



Panasonic GH3 with Olympus 75/1.8
GH3 - New and Old by Archiver, on Flickr


Panasonic GM1 with Olympus 25/1.8
GM1 - Girard by Archiver, on Flickr


GM1 - Lumix by Lumix by Archiver, on Flickr


GM1 - Lemon Lime and Bitters by Archiver, on Flickr


Panasonic GM1 with Olympus 45/1.8
GM1 - Waiting For Dinner by Archiver, on Flickr
 
I can answer that!

I shot for several years with a Canon 5DmkII, which is a 20mp fullframe camera. For the last year, I have been shooting with 20mp Micro Four Thirds cameras (Olympus Pen-F and Olympus OM-D E-M1 mark II).

So, we have two 20mp systems, one fullframe, the other Micro Four Thirds. Huge sensor-size difference. I think that fullframe has almost 4 times the surface area of m4/3. I have made and sold 16x20 prints from each.

The difference? To be honest, the m4/3 sensors give the finest detail resolution! Why? Part of it is that Canon uses a rather aggressive anti-aliasing filter on the 5DmkII's sensor. This softens fine detail, not all of which is recoverable through image sharpening. Olympus's 20mp sensors have no anti-aliasing filters. Another thing is that the Canon lens I used for the photos I printed large just plain aren't as sharp as the Micro Four Thirds lens I used.

I used the Canon 24-105mm F4L-IS lens for fullframe and the Olympus 12-40mm f2.8 Pro lens for m4/3. The Olympus lens is equivalent to a 24-80mm fullframe lens. I am continually amazed at the image quality of this lens.

So, a smaller sensor with better lenses and no anti-aliasing filter beats a much larger sensor with poorer lenses and an anti-aliasing filter that blurs the finest details.

There is one other difference, and that is noise. The fullframe Canon sensor has less of it than the Olympus Micro Four Thirds sensors. I've found, however, that even using more noise reduction in Lightroom to eliminate the m4/3 noise, the m4/3 images are still better, with more fine detail resolution. Even at high ISO.

More modern fullframe sensors have less noise than the one used on the Canon 5DmkII, so at high-ISO speeds a modern fullframe sensor might be superior to the m4/3 sensors.

So from your perspective, with some subtleties, a pixel is a pixel is a pixel.
 
I haven't used the OM-D EM5, so I can't comment on how it compares to the much newer Pen-F and E-M1 mk II viewfinders.

I don't think the electronic viewfinders are as clear and sharp as a good optical finder like that in the OM-1. For autofocus, they're fine, but for manual focus they're a bit of a pain.

Because its is near-impossible to judge sharpness on them when manually focusing, the Olympuses and many other mirrorless cameras offer a magnified mode on the EVF where it magnifies part of the image to facilitate manual focusing. Even with that, manual focus works best if you activate focus peaking (it can be turned on and off).

It works, but feels like a kludge. Also in very dim light, MF is hard. That's true also of many optical SLR finders, too, though.

So, my verdict is that the EVF in the newer Olympus cameras is ok. It takes some getting used to and if you only do AF, it works well. Its the price you pay for having such tiny, lightweight cameras.

I have been using my XT-2 with both adapted lenses and for slide copying with an enlarging lens (where focus is critical) and feel the same way. I am able to get it sharp, but really did not think about the fact that is actually an EVF. In general use the EVF is so good on the Fuji that I take it for granted, but in these cases, the optical reality of the EVF is important. These cases may may ones where DSLRs still have some advantage over mirrorless.
 
So from your perspective, with some subtleties, a pixel is a pixel is a pixel.




Yep! At least in good quality interchangeable lens cameras. Point n shoot cameras often give far lower image quality than a DSLR with the same number of pixels, but those p-n-s cameras have ridiculously tiny sensors.
 
What is image quality? A couple of students I share a darkroom with produce better images with under $100 film SLRs than anything I've lately seen posted to a Leica forum.
 
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:eek::eek::eek:

And that Sigma Merrill is the best of the lot :p
 
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