Olympus E-M5 III - Hands-On Review

The Olympus E-M5 III takes features from the E-M1 II and puts them into a smaller, more portable body. How does it stack up?
Find out more about the Olympus E-M5 III: http://bit.ly/35IKb7M

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Intro - 0:00
Body - 0:46
Sensor & Image Quality - 2:05
Art Modes - 3:05
Image Stabilisation - 3:16
Autofocus - 4:12
Video - 6:03
Conclusion - 6:51


Today we’re checking out the brand new Olympus E-M5 III. So the E-M5 sits in the middle of the OM-D range, above the E-M10 and below the E-M1. It’s actually been quite a while since we saw a new version of this camera, as the Mark II came out in early 2015. Since that release Olympus has upped their performance pretty significantly in cameras like the E-M1 II and E-M1X, and the E-M5 III inherits a number of the features introduced in these larger, more expensive cameras, while still keeping a smaller form factor. Now we’ll start by discussing the body, but check the video description if you want to jump to a specific section.

Physically speaking there’s not many changes here. It’s the same design that we’ve seen on OM-D cameras for some time - compact, stylish, with a bit of a retro design and a good spread of manual control dials.Size is a major factor here, and Olympus is particularly pushing that, while it has a number of high-performance features in here, it comes in at only about 55% the size of a full frame mirrorless system, and it’s actually about 50g lighter than the Mark II was. Like the Mark II this is a weather sealed camera, so you can take it out into adverse conditions. There’s new Custom and Bulb slots on the mode dial, and we still have a fully articulating screen. We’ve got a mic jack, remote port, USB and HDMI. Battery-wise this actually now uses the BLS-50 battery from the E-M10 III, not the larger BLN-1 from the E-M5 II. However they’ve made some improvements to efficiency and it’s rated at 310 shots, which is about average. You can charge it via USB though, including with a USB power bank. It has wifi but also gains Bluetooth, which allows it to establish connection with your device a bit faster

Internally the sensor has been upgraded to 20MP. The image quality is quite high, and that resolution allows you a nice amount of room to crop and blow up your photos. And if you occasionally need higer resolution, you can use the Hi-res mode which takes 8 shots and combines them together to get a 50MP image, which gives you even more flexibility. It also upgrades to the TruePic 8 processor that was launched on the E-M1 II, and that power increase is going to be the main enabler of the improved performance that we’ll discuss.

Olympus has always excelled at in-body image stabilisation, and though that’s become more common in other brands recently, personally I still think they offer the strongest result here. The E-M5 III is rated at 5.5 stops of stabilisation, a small increase over the Mark II which was rated for 5. And in fact when combined with the Olympus 12-100mm or 300mm IS lenses that increases to 6.5 stops
-Here I’m shooting handheld with a non-IS lens at 150mm (which is the equivalent of 300mm on full frame), and you can see it’s super steady. Of course it will also help you shoot photos in low light because you can shoot with a slower shutter speed

Now lets talk about autofocus, which is where a lot of the meat of this camera is, as this is where it heavily borrows from it’s spec’d out larger brothers. It has a 121-point phase-detect AF system, taken from the E-M1 II. This is an upgrade over the 81-point contrast detect system from the E-M5 Mark II. Personally I noticed a big difference in performance here. AF on the E-M5 Mark II was ok, but the E-M1 II was specifically designed with AF speed in mind, so gaining that AF system here is a significant improvement in pretty much every way - single shot, continuous, tracking and video. It has an upgraded 10 fps mechanical shutter and 30 fps via electronic shutter (vs 5 and 10 respectively on the Mark II), so you can do some very speedy burst shooting. It also has Eye Detect, which is a feature that is all the rage these days but has actually been present on every Olympus camera since 2011.
Another new feature is Procapture, which is the first time seeing this on a non E-M1 model. This is where you can hold the shutter down halfway, it will continuously buffer shots and when you actually take the photo it saves the 14 shots BEFORE you actually pressed the button.

Video-wise the camera can shoot do Cinema 4K at 24 fps at 237 Mbps, which is pretty solid. Being a small camera with a fully articulating screen, 4K video, mic jack and exceptional image stabilisation makes this a pretty solid vlogging option.

For an enthusiast shooter who wants strong performance while still maintaining a compact, I think the E-M5 III is a great option.