Hi all, this started off at a tangent to my Canon EOS-M thread, but maybe it should have its own. There is a fair bit of discussion on the net, and here, about the advent of serious Four Thirds and the new Micro Four Thirds camera systems coming out recently from not only Olympus but other manufacturers such as Sony, Panasonic and Fuji.They are maturing at a fantastic rate and are now edging up to (and in some areas exceeding) capabilities of the likes of the top prosumer models from Nikon and Canon. The OM-D is weather sealed too: (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmdo_K1XIE0 ) This is great when you sit there worrying unnecessarily about heavy due affecting your new camera. The body is made from magnesium alloy, so it is as tough as any pro Canon or Nikon body. It's a very solid little thing.
I hope to try it out soon on the back of my Tak Sky90, and also with the wonderful new Olympus 75mm f/1.8 lens for astro. Hopefully it will give results that will work for this, although I stress that I did not buy it for astro work. I have a CCD for this. Might be interesting. One thing to its advantage is that the slowest exposure you can achieve without going to Bulb (or "LiveTime" - more is a sec) is a full 60 seconds. That's 30 seconds more than any Nikon or Canon I've owned - and you don't need a remote. I really like this for static Milky Way photography from a tripod. You can take a lot of ultra-wide field goodness in 60 seconds at moderate ISO. "LiveTime" is an interesting extension on the Bulb setting. You can set you camera to expose, and watch the image form on the screen as it "develops". Great thing I'm thinking about here is being able to gauge just when an exposure has had enough. Very nice.
I'll provide some technical detail shortly, and how I've found adjusting to the OM-D coming from a Canon 5D Mark-II and the use of several L-Series lenses.
Here are a few shots of the camera itself.