A few thoughts about Olympus vs Panasonic for wedding photography

Bots_Revenge wrote:

Marco Cinnirella wrote:

...experience is also that the 5-axis IBIS in the OMD line is better than the IBIS in the GX7 and often better than the OIS in some Pannie lenses...

In most situations I would totally agree with you. Having the 5-axis stabilization on the E-M1 working in the viewfinder is such a pleasure for the eye, that I can hardly describe it.

Still, there's an interesting observation that I had a few months ago: I was shooting some dishes in extremely low light - f2.8, ISO 2500, 1/10" with the Panasonic 35-100 @ 100mm. I had about 10% keepers from multiple attempts with the 5-axis IBIS. Then I switched to the Panasonic OIS and had about 70% keepers at the same settings. It turns out that in extremely low light the Pana OIS is more effective but for video I like the 5-Axis IBIS more because it looks like it's floating. The OIS tries to nail the subject in frame until it reaches the maximum movement of the OIS elements and then it sharply bounces to the center when you move the camera. This is quite abrupt.

Actually this is the exact reason for having such a high success rate with the OIS - at 1/10" keeping the subject nailed in the frame while the stabilization is working full time is what produced sharp images. On the contrary the floating nature of the 5-axis IBIS is what couldn't provide sharpness.

OIS with mercalli, bliss! The ibis with primes is nice too for low light but OMD video is so limiting and also poor in low light anyway that you gain nothing anyway. Best just to shoot the 2.8's, at 25mm and iso3200 if necessary de-noise and stabilise if required. Pana video is still very usable at high iso's and you can even drop to 1/25 sec if necessary for 25 or 24p. The 12-35-35-100 2.8's offers a lot of options for videographers/still shooters, the 100-300 at f4-f.4.5 is also an option if longer reach required.