Disappointments and surprises of Olympus and MFT

Rich K wrote:

Just a couple of observations ...

- If the rear dial is beginning to fail and you're unwilling to fix it, then it seems to me that your options are entirely wide open regarding both a new body and new lenses. If as you say you do most of your shooting at the long end, then perhaps there's a better combination for you? Although I'm uncertain that you'd find anything competitive to what you might pay just for the Leica 100-400mm when you're talking both a body and lenses.

- As lenses go, you've got an "interesting" collection. Again, if you're shooting mostly at the long end, that's where you should go for the quality. If I were you I'd probably pony up for the 100-400mm, although I've also seen some nice results from other posters using the older Panny 100-300. And I might suggest that you unload the other lenses and consider the Panny 12-35/2.8 and 35-100/2.8 zooms, which seem to have both been reduced to under $800 lately. Great versatility, small and sharp. And they have no problem supporting their lens hoods. This of course assumes that you're going to keep the EM1.

- As far as bad JPEG colors go, you might take a look at your settings. I personally found that "vivid" was way too much (may not be labeled the same on the EM1). Just my opinion.

1) My options are wide open, except that in my country only Sony has competitive pricing. There's also Canon, Nikon, Panasonic and Fuji, but all of them are very overpriced. Also, the selection of gear is miserable in most cases. I had high hopes for Samsung, which sold very well here, but they're pretty much dead now. So, at this point, I'm thinking it's either my second return to Sony, or I stick with the E-M1.

2) My lens collection is certainly weird, caused mainly by two things: there's a small used market for micro four thirds here, but I've found good bargains by searching; also, I bought the E-M1 expressly to use older FT gear, since most of it is well built and optically corrected. In theory, that would leave me the possibility to use both tiny lenses for MFT as well as better (and cheaper) pieces from the old catalog. I also have to have some very small lenses as I bought my wife an E-P3, with the idea that we could share lenses (she's not dedicated enough to carry the Olympus 12-40mm or something like that, the Panasonic serves her fine). This makes me reluctant to change systems again.

3) I will check the JPEG settings, it seems like something critical to do.

Thanks a lot for the suggestions.