One Week With The E-M1 Mark II

Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II, m.Zuiko 12-40mm f2.8 Pro

So I've now had a working E-M1 Mark II for a week, as well as the 12-40 Pro. I've gotten out for a few walks and one moderate hike and shot a little over 750 images during that week. 

I've noted that after years of rarely shooting too seriously with any body, I've put a lot of mileage on pretty much every body I've used seriously in 2019 and 2020. That's more from the fact that I've simply found my motivation than anything else. 

I think I may need to update my 3 stages of camera ownership soon, because either just about everything I've had except the A6300 or X-E2 has made it past the equivocation stage. I think that's part motivation getting my shooting rate up and part choosing cameras better. 

I've commented in the past that I think that selling my original X-T1 and buying back into m43 may have been a mistake. Selling the m43 kit to go FF again was an even bigger one. While I did do a lot of good work with my D750, I never gelled with any of the FF gear to the level I did with either the Fuji or m43 kits. The one bit of good news is that I never had much in the way of valuable lenses the last time through, only my 9-18 was actually valuable. This time around I am focusing on higher-end glass to get around some of the limitations I had with my m43 kit last time, specifically getting the 12-40 f2.8 Pro and 40-150 f2.8 Pro instead of the 12-50 f3.5-6.3 EZ and 40-150 f4-5.6 R. It's more carry weight, but much more flexibility at the same time, especially since the 40-150 Pro is TC compatible and is known to play well with the 1.4x TC in particular. 

I've really found the E-M1 Mark II to be extremely easy to get used to, it was almost seamless to start using, even more so than the X-T2 and I took to that body almost immediately. It's so nice to have easily located buttons even when shooting with my heavy gloves. If the A7II was noticeably better than the Fuji's when gloved, the Olympus is pretty much on par with the D300 for gloved handling, it might actually be even better than the D300 simply due to how raised the top buttons are compared to the D300's. There's also grip/lens clearance almost on par with the D300, and much better than the Sony. The Fuji's ergonomics are quite good in terms of lens/finger clearance, but that's due to the small front grip extensions, even with the add-on grips.

AF is notably better than the X-T2, the key thing is that it does much better in the woods with a longer lens than the X-T2+55-200 was. That lens had two frustrations for me, one was the relatively mediocre close focus performance, I'd been spoiled by the better close focus performance of the Olympus lenses, and the other was the tendency of the AF system to get confused in busy conditions, the E-M1 Mark II suffers far less from that than the X-T2.