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Okay, so in the last post on the OM-D, I said I'd only go up to 1600 ISO for JPEGs on the Olympus OM-D.
Allow me to please correct myself.
I'd use this camera all the way up to 6400. Maybe even higher. I'm a little astounded what this camera can produce. When first looking at the files, I was used to the Canon 5D mk2 and how it renders files and noise.
The OM-D is different. What I was seeing had a totally different character, especially in the out of focus areas. But the more I use this camera, the more accustomed to the 'look' I get. It's more like medium speed film. It's certainly not noise-free but considering I shoot film and have never been bothered by noise in digital (provided it has detail and is not a horrible smoothed out smudge - I do hate that) I feel I should recant.
The OM-D's files are superb. Huge amounts of detail. Sharpness at the pixel level I'm not used to seeing from the 5D mk2 (!). Astonishing.
But let me state, for the record, that I don't demand or expect perfectly smooth images. In fact I hate perfectly smooth images. Base ISO on the OM-D (and pretty much any decent camera today) will give you that. I like images with texture and character and depth. This is why I shoot a ton of film still. This is why my workflow almost always takes a trip through Nik's superb (let me say that a second time: superb) software. This is why my portrait subjects look like people and not manequins.
This mindset is one of the reason I moved to Micro Four Thirds. Admittedly with a little lump of anxiety in my throat. But all is well, lump is gone.
But each to their own.
I keep telling people that this camera feels like the future of photography. The more I use it the more I love it the more I feel this way.