Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II review

Detail and Noise

At its lowest standard sensitivity of ISO 200, the E-M5 Mark II gives clean images with attractive colours and lots of fine detail. ISO 100 is, if anything, even cleaner, but this comes at the cost of earlier highlight clipping. Stepping up through the sensitivity range shows that excellent results are still obtained at ISO 800, although with some loss of detail both in the shadows, and in finely-textured patterns. By ISO 3200 almost all fine detail has been blurred away by noise reduction, and shadows are being clipped to hide visible noise; but colours remain strong and saturated, meaning that images still look quite attractive overall. The top three settings, though, look increasingly stretched.

40MP composite mode

Switch to 40MP mode and camera can resolve visibly more detail and texture. Because it’s a multi-shot mode, noise is also kept very low up to the maximum available sensitivity of ISO 1600. In the crops below you can see visibly more fine detail and texture compared to the 16MP versions, with the image staying pretty clean at ISO 1600 (where usually the fine detail is blurred-away by noise reduction).

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