Olympus OM-D E-M10 Review – Image Quality

Olympus OM-D E-M10 review sample image gallery

Colour and white balance

The E-M10’s auto white balance capabilities are impressive, managing to set the correct mode almost always and displaying no real tendency to either end of the scale.

Even when shooting in settings featuring mixed lighting sources, the E-M10 managed a faithful reproduction of the scene being captured.

As a result, the general colour palette is also fairly true to life, while there is a broad range of different colour modes and filters which can be applied should you want more of an adventurous finish to your images.

Exposure

The E-M10 inherits its metering system from Olympus’s PEN range – much like the OM-D E-M5.

The good news is that this metering system generally performs well – managing to judge shadows and highlights precisely and make the relevant corrections, and as such manage to not under or overexpose images.

The E-M10 also delivers in terms of dynamic range performance, managing to delivering a range almost matching the level of performance given by similarly-priced DSLRs. There is the odd time when highlights display slightly clipped detail, although that does mean that there is more detail in shadowy areas.

Resolution and Noise

In terms of the level of detail the Olympus is capable of resolving the E-M10 performs pretty well, managing a readout of around 28lpmm at the lowest extended ISO setting of ISO 100.

In terms of image noise, the in-camera noise reduction does a great job at the lower settings, right up to ISO 1600. Above this there is an impact on the rendering of fine detail, although on the whole the E-M10 is a capable performer in this regard.

Raw v JPEG

Although noise does become more apparent, more quickly in Raw files, that does mean that a greater level of detail is captured. In post production it’s a simple enough process to reduce the apparent noise.

The only real criticism in this area is that the E-M10 is a touch too aggressive when it comes to sharpening of JPEG files. Although this effect can be toned down using the shipped Olympus Viewer 3 image processing software, the performance straight out of camera is a touch disappointing.