Reviews |Olympus changed everything about the E-M1 II on the inside – but kept the outside the same

Olympus changed everything about the E-M1 II on the inside – but kept the outside the same

Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II
News

The Olympus OM-D E-M1 II has been causing a bit of a stir at Photokina 2016, with many describing it as one of the highlights of the show.

Outwardly it looks very similar to the original OM-D E-M1, but speaking to Camera Jabber, Toshi Terada, General Manager for Olympus’ Global Marketing Department explained that the interior has undergone on a complete transformation – even down to the viewfinder – to give it that high speed functionality that has got everyone talking.

“We needed to change everything about the camera, but also the EVF. People like to chase the subject and the problem with the previous EVF was delay and refresh speed. We’ve changed it so that we have continuous live view even with 18fps shooting.”

In terms of individual components of the camera, the sensor now has a 3x quicker read out speed, the processor is 3.5x faster and the memory is 2x faster (than the E-M1). When you add all this together with a UHS-II card then you should get some lightning quick results.

“Outwardly it looks the same, but the inside is totally new, Terada explained.” You may wonder why the company decided to stick with the same design rather than tweaking it to highlight the overhaul.

“There was some discussion about whether to change the design,” UK Marketing Manager Mark Thackara told us, also at Photokina, “but the design is quite well accepted so we decided to keep it”.

In terms of OM-D E-M1 pricing, that’s not been revealed, but Mark gave us a small hint, “it will be a little bit more than the old one…” – we wait with anticipation to see just how little that is, and of course, to get our hands on a working sample.

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