(Some) GH2 owners going through Kubler-Ross

Right now I'm going through a stage Kubler-Ross didn't cover. I have a GH2 and am satisfied with its image quality. I added an E-M 5 because I thought it would be nice to have in-body stabilization (for my old adapted M-mount lenses) and wireless TTL flash.

I've had the E-M 5 for two weeks now, and have had a chance to try it out on all three of my main types of picture-taking: a studio shoot, a documentary gig, and a stage performance. The pictures were fine.

But if I suddenly received a court order saying I was allowed to keep only one camera or the other, it's the E-M 5 I'd send back and the GH2 I'd keep. What would Kubler-Ross call that?

I have a post on another thread with my initial impressions (both positive and negative) of the E-M 5 vs. the GH2, but here's a bit more detail based on my additional experiences:

-- Compared to the GH2, everything on the E-M 5 seems just a bit more sluggish. For example, it takes a bit longer to power up, and when you turn the control knobs, there's a slight lag before the readout numbers in the finder change. Those two are only minor nuisances, but in other things it's more critical, for instance...

-- Both cameras power down the EVF when the camera is away from your eye, and power it up again when you bring the camera up to view. On the GH2, the finder lights up almost instantly; it's ready to shoot by the time I can get the camera to my eye. The E-M 5 seems to take about 3/4 of a second to light up the EVF. That may not sound like much, but I missed several good grab shots during the documentary gig because I'd be ready to shoot but the finder was still blacked out.

-- Same thing with focusing; the E-M 5 is just a little laggy. I particularly noticed this when shooting the stage performance (a university dance company, shot mostly with the Olympus 45mm f/1.8 lens.) Mirrorless cameras work better in SAF than CAF, so my usual practice with the GH2 is to watch through the finder, half-press the release when a key moment approaches to lock focus, then recompose and press fully when the decisive moment happens. This didn't work nearly as well with the E-M 5 because it takes noticeably longer to lock in focus. I don't have any objective measurements, but I've shot a lot of stage productions and I think my instincts are pretty good on this; the AF was making me miss shots that I wouldn't have missed with the GH2.

-- Another annoying bit of slug: post-shot review in the EVF. All Mirrorless cameras black out the EVF briefly after the shot while writing the data (kind of like an SLR's finder blackout) but you can set the camera to show the last shot briefly during this period so you can check for problems. I keep the GH2 set to review for 0.5 second, which is enough to make sure the focus and exposure were okay without interrupting the flow too much; I set the E-M 5 the same way. But it didn't work as well. On the GH2, the review shot appears more or less instantly and disappears instantly. The E-M 5 is slower (notice the trend here); the finder goes black for a moment, shows your review shot, then goes black again, and then you're back to live view. I felt a lot more disconnected from the performance.

There ARE things I like a lot about the E-M 5: the shutter is very quiet and has a nice "click" feel; the body is solid and compact; and the in-body stabilization is a huge aid for manual focus because you can set it to freeze the magnified finder image as you turn the focus ring. But when you come down to it, that's about it; in terms of performance during my kinds of shooting, the GH2 is otherwise superior in just about every way. Image quality looks to me to be a wash, at least on raw files (to me, comparing cameras based on JPEG files is like comparing sports cars based on how they handle on flat tires; why would you handicap yourself that way?)

Note that I'm not a reviewer: I bought the E-M 5 with my own money and consequently am strongly biased by the "endowment effect" to think it's great. But I just don't. I'm keeping it for the same reasons I bought it -- IBIS and wireless TTL, plus the fact that it's too late to return it -- but I still can't help feeling that the GH2 is a better picture-taker, at least for my kinds of shooting.