Timur Born wrote:
"It does not achieve what I need and it does not help me (enough) to overcome shortcomings of my photographic skills."
Here we come to the last but most important part of why I may have to part with the E-M5, and maybe even M43. Everything else was just "if I don't walk around with it regularly then I don't make full use of the M43 advantages while having to live with its disadvantages". But I am ultimately not able to achieve the results that I need. Much of this is down to lack of photographic skills and takes time to learn, but there are technological hurdles presented by the E-M5 which I am not longer willing to workaround. The E-M5 is a fantastic camera, with very good sensor and performance and lots of helpful options. But most of my problems have to do with contrast-detection auto-focus and the need for fast apertures with indoor shooting (home).
Why do I need fast apertures? We have bad lighting in most of our rooms, so for any picture where I cannot or want not use flash - or want enough ambient light - I need a fast lens. Why do I need a fast lens for that? I am takings photographs of kids, they don't sit still. And when they do sit still it only happens until they notice me pointing a camera at them. So I need fast shutter times to stop down movement. And since at one point I reach the limit of ISO where images get too noisy/smeared up the way to stop down action in bad light is to use faster lenses.
I am no s*cker for shallow depth of field and mostly enjoy well composed pictures with good DOF more than shallow ones. Thing is: we have a colorful and rather messy home, especially in those rooms where my kids are mostly hanging around. So shallow depth of field combined with a focal length that magnifies the background into obscurity is a way of working around our home's shortcoming. Feel free to offer us a bigger home or clean up the mess the kids leave behind at every waking minute, but shallow depth of field in combination with meeting other people's expectations of what makes a pleasing portrait seems to be the more manageable option.
So we have kids crawling and running close to the ground in bad light with shallow depth of field. Any professional photographer would struggle with these circumstances, so what do I expect?! I expect, or rather hope for, better means to focus on small spots/eyes, better means to focus on moving targets and higher reliability of the already present methods offered by the camera.
To begin with, I expected Olympus to copy & paste their firmware code from the E-P5 that would allow to regularly use the smallest (x14) focus point on the E-M5 without having to use the Magnify button. Often this smallest AF frame is essential to focusing on eyes, hopefully even the iris and not just the eyebrows above. It may just be a single button press, but there are some unpleasant consequences. Magnify view shows less information, there are no levels, no histogram and no blinkies. And it also turns off whenever you start playback, go to the menu, want to change flash or drive settings. The latter of which now always needs several button clicks and thus makes operation awkward (notice how often I use this word here?). It would have been so easy for Olympus to implement this little already half-present function into its flagship camera - and get rid of the already *acknowledged* bugs along the way - that it became clear that they hold it back for the pure reason of saving money and making people buy the next model even for such minor improvements.
Then there is the main issue we currently face with all M43 cameras until the E-M1 hopefully resolves it with hybrid PD AF focus points. Continuous AF (AF-C) is on the border of useless for any close targets (shallower DOF). Its inner workings are so that it signals "in focus" and allows to expose while it's still hunting back and forth in such a big range that you need luck to get the correct focal plane. After focus confirmation (beep and green dot) it takes up a whooping 3 seconds until the hunting stops, but only if you manage to keep any motion out of the focus frame (including camera shake). Yesterday I tested a NEX-6 in AF-C and it was worlds better. I could focus in between my close hand and the far away background quickly and without any noticeable back and forth hunting. Bravo! This only was a short test, so I don't know how the NEX' AF-C works in practice, but the thing is that the E-M5's rather unsubtle hunting is always present and spoils shots.
The possible workaround are to always use burst mode or hammer on the shutter button hoping to get a good shot. I wasn't very successful with either of these and frankly don't want to sort through dozens of images every time I take casual shots of my kids, just to find the one that is in focus. So either M43 needs better means to track nearby moving targets or I need a camera with hopefully better working PD AF. Keep in mind that this is my very special usage case that is somewhat demanding for any camera and photographer. By the way, the manual warns that focusing may fail if there are no vertical lines on your subject. So there is no such thing as "cross-type" AF on the E-M5 it seems, which may or may not be a problem with certain targets or portrait/landscape orientations.
Last but not least there are the reliability issues of the helpful features already offered by the E-M5. Theoretically AF-S should be fast enough to get it right in many cases. Unfortunately focusing on the E-M5 considerably slows down in sometimes even light shadows due to the way it slows down to 30 fps in order to maintain EC preview in Live View and a brighter image in dark shadows. Unfortunately indoors it doesn't take much to make Live View and thus focusing slow down to 30 fps, and if you are using a shallow DOF combined with a small AF frame on top of that it can all be too slow to work in practice. One possible workaround is to use "Fast" frame-rates for Live View. This will keep the camera from slowing down and often makes it focus faster in even in shadow areas that "Normal" is able to capture brighter. Drawbacks of this are a far less pleasant Live View due to downsizing filters (likely bilinear) being turned off and a rather dark screen/EVF image with only limited preview capabilities in darker environments.
Don't even think about suggesting Face Detection. It's a nice feature, but lacking serious power and reliability to make regular use of it. FD on the Fujifilm X10 was more reliable than on the E-M5, giving *far* less false detections of things that don't even closely resemble faces and even being able to detect faces from the side. The E-M5 struggles a lot on detecting faces when eyebrows are hidden, part of the mouth is blocked or the subject is seen too much from the side. Eye detection more often than not focuses on the protruding eyebrows and even far worse, when no eyes are detected the E-M5 had a high tendency to focus on the protruding tip of the nose (center of face box I guess). And once you pair this all with fast lenses (shallow DOF) you absolutely have to prefocus to get a useful result out of this combination. Of course the kids already came half a meter closer in all that time it took to get the shot.
The last sentence brings me back to what I wrote before: "When they do sit still it only happens until they notice me pointing a camera at them". Turns out that the relatively silent shutter on the E-M5 is still too loud to not make everyone in the room turn their heads towards me (including my wife). Seems like I either need some electronic shutter or silent shutter mode or need to use smaller sensor cameras with much more silent shutters more often. And when M43 is still too loud to make everyone notice that they are being photographed then another advantage of the system goes down the drain. Albeit I have to admit that the very loud clicking front wheel of Canon DSLRs really spoils it a lot earlier before you even hit the shutter.
