Which camera gets the best out of the Lumix G 30mm f2.8 Macro?

HenrilensUK wrote:

Which m43 camera gets the best out of the Lumix G 30mm f2.8 Macro? Personally, I have 2 choices, the GX7 or Olympus OMD EM 10 Mk ii but please feel free to suggest others. I just love this lens and the camera body isn’t so important. It is capable of some stunning images. Thanks, in advance, to anybody who contributes.

I suspect the sensor would be the primary indicator of image goodness. Both cameras use the 16 megapixel sensor, so they are problably similar at the RAW level. At the JPEG level, it depends on whether you like Olympus or Panasonic JPEGs (I'm in the Olympus camp).

The 20 megapixel cameras (Pen-F, G9, E-m1 mark II) are said to offer somewhat better images, particularly in high ISO situations.

The E-m10 mark II does have focus bracketing where you can get the camera to automatically take a lot of pictures, moving the focus point slowly. You can then use software in post processing to stack the images together to give you more depth of field. It does not offer an automatic stack option where the camera does the stacking in the body if you shoot with certain Olympus pro/macro lenses (the E-m1 mark I/II, E-m5 mark II, and Pen-F offer focus stacking). I doubt the E-m10 mark III has focus bracketing.

But since your 30mm is Panasonic branded, you would not be able to use focus stacking on the cameras that support it.  I believe focus bracketing works on any micro 4/3rds lens with auto-focusing.

The GX7 has a similar mode to Olympus stacking where it shoots a special 4K video with all of the different focus points as separate frames, and you can later pick with focus points to combine together. Note a 4K image is only 2.1 megabytes, while the Olympus focus bracketing mode would record each frame at 16 megapixels.