REVIEWS
OM System OM-1
Price: £2,000/$2200
Does OM System’s first serious camera deliver enough to keep Olympus photographers on board? Angela Nicholson takes a closer look at the OM-1
Angela Nicholson
Digital Photographer EDITOR'S CHOICE
The past few years have seen a turbulent period for the camera industry and part of the fallout has been the sale of Olympus’s photographic business and its re-emergence as OM Digital Systems under the OM System brand name.
The first camera to come from this brand (we don’t count the Pen E P7 as that was from Olympus) still has the Olympus badge. Nevertheless, it’s called the OM System OM-1. In case that isn’t confusing enough, the OM-1 is the successor to the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark III and it takes the OM-D E-M1X’s place as the company’s flagship camera.
Inside the OM-1 is a 20.4MP Four-Thirds Type stacked, backside-illuminated CMOS sensor. It’s the first time that a stacked sensor has been used in a Micro Four-Thirds camera and it’s paired with a new TruePic X processing engine, which is three times faster than the previous processor. This combination enables full-resolution shooting at up to 120fps (frames per second) in Sequential Shooting SH1 or Pro Capture SH1 mode. The focus and exposure are locked at the start of the sequence in those modes, but in the Sequential Shooting SH2 and Pro Capture SH2 modes, you can shoot at up to 50fps with continuous autofocus (C-AF) for up to 96 RAW files or 97 Large Fine JPEGs.