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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

At this point M43 is, in my neck of the woods, basically a video format anyway. I do on-site videography (my schtick being "we can run a four-camera live show from anywhere I've got Ethernet and power") and all my cameras are M43 because they hit a great spot on the price/quality curve. (Sony's APS-C cameras are very respectable too, but the glass is pricey.)

Never used an Olympus, never understood the point of one. If I cared about photography in a serious way I'd have already bought an A7 of some flavor.

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They're cheap! You can pretty easily get an olympus body for 2-300 bucks and a m43 lens also pretty cheap. The panasonic 25mm for example is usually around $100-150.

That all sounds big until you realize an a7 body is like minimum $1000.

They're definitely cheap, but so are the Panasonics, like the G7. What I'm saying is that I don't know what Olympus brings to the table given that they're more photo-forward, but not really much better than the Panasonic cameras, and much worse for video.

That 25mm Panasonic lens is a boss, though. I have two, along with the shorty 20mm Panasonic (which is not as good; it doesn't do AF-C, wtf?) and the 42.5mm Panasonic (which is the most delightful lens I own if I have enough room to use it).

I also have two of the Panasonic 14-140mm video lenses, and while I don't love shooting at like f3.5 they are invaluable when I'm working on-site.

What Olympus brought was in-body image stabilisation. Panasonics never had it (maybe they do now? I haven't been paying attention lately) and it makes all the difference if your thing is photography with just any lens that will fit.

That makes a lot of sense now that I think about it. The G7 and later have Panasonic's newest lens stabilization stuff with compatible lenses but you don't see IBIS until you go up to the S1 full-frame, which costs as much as everybody else's full-frame and the lens selection isn't great so you might as well go buy a Sony A7-of-some-flavor.

I run and gun with the G7 for photos, as it is my lightest camera by far, and I've been pretty pleased with its fast focus and in-hand shooting, but I could see how it could improve.

You might want to check the IBIS specs for the G9 and GH5. No need to go up to the S1 line.

Huh, the G9 has IBIS? I’ve never even stopped to look. My cameras (except the G7 when on vacation) live on tripods. But thanks!

Ha ha, quite the discovery seeing as your other comments reveal you own and shoot with one :-)

On a tripod. ;) Truth be told I bought it for HFR video, a bit better exposure/image quality so I don’t have to light myself in the face quite so hard, and because of the full-size HDMI port. The rest is gravy!

G7 has IBIS, it's only 2 axis however (and not that great...)

I've never used a non-Power OIS lens with the G7 off a tripod, so I guess I'd never notice.

The G9 has IBIS. And the GH5. And dual OIS in conjunction with panasonic lenses.

> What Olympus brought was in-body image stabilisation.

I think Olympus and Sony did some cross-licensing deal on their patents, which I believe resulted in Sony's IBIS gaining the 5-axis stuff.

I had a Sony DSLR back in the Alpha days, and the IBIS they had back then was inferior to OIS.

A little steep on the body. A7ii with kit lense is ~1000.

Never used an Olympus, never understood the point of one.

I see a connection there :). The Olympus cameras are extremely capable, yet small in size. An E-M10 or E-M5 have a tiny body and there are extremely compact lenses to match them. Yet, despite the smaller sensor (compared to 35mm) you don't sacrifice much of image quality (or none at all for many tasks) due to the excellent lenses.

I use M43 cameras all the time, I'm very familiar with its lenses and the sensor and its capability. I used to own a LUMIX GM5 (which went really well with a 12-32mm), which is smaller than any Olympus camera I've ever seen. I still have trouble understanding the value prop of Olympus, specifically, in the M43 space over Panasonic.

(Apparently IBIS used to be a differentiator, but as I have learned in this thread, the G9/GH5 have it and retain their lens OIS too.)

> The Olympus cameras are extremely capable, yet small in size.

That advantage evaporated after Sony released A7 in 2013, which was almost equal in size yet contained a vastly larger and more capable sensor. Olympus hung on while A7 line was still expensive, but now that one can get an older used model for as much as a new micro-four-thirds one, Olympus bit the dust. Many saw this coming for a long while.

While the high price of an A7 probably slowed new customers rushing to Sony over Olympus I think the primary reason customers stuck with Olympus was "vendor lock-in" with lens mounts. People likely bought multiple m43 mount lenses to go with their Olympus or Panasonic. A customer would be more likely to buy another one of these brands if they had an existing lens collection over switching to the A7.

Note: I am reluctant to use the term vendor lock-in as the idea behind m43 was to have multiple camera manufacturers adopt a common lens mount. The fact that Sony and Canon have their own mounts is a net negative in my opinion.

Yeah, much more than body prices for me has been lens prices.

A 25mm f1.7 m43 lens is $150. I've got multiple. I don't mind putting them in kinda-risky places on my cheaper bodies if it makes sense.

A 25mm f1.7 M4/3 lens is equivalent to a 50mm f/3.5 lens. Which costs about as much on a FF body - as part of a zoom lens.

In fact, the much better Sony 50mm 1.8 also costs about 150$.

No, the advantage did not evaporate with the A7. Yes, the body of an A7 is pretty close to the mFT counterparts - though for a really tiny body look at the E-M10 and the E-M5, these are a step smaller than the Sony.

But the one thing which did not shrink are the lenses. Actually modern designs rather grow the lenses. Look at the Olympus 25/1.8, 45/1.8, they are tiny. And of course on the long side, look at the difference of a 40-150/2.8 and 300/4 to their counterparts. This is where mFT wins big time.

This is why I kept buying into mFT, because my Olympus kit in total is significantly more compact than any 35mm equivalent.

It's true that on the long end 35mm full-frame lenses are significantly larger and heavier than micro-four thirds lenses. However, most people don't shoot extremely long lenses most of the time (and when they do they can afford to use a lighter f4 lens because larger sensors have better noise peformance). Compare Tamron 28-75 f2.8 for Sony E mount (550 g) with Olympus 12-40 f2.8 (382 g). That's only 168 g (44%) more for a lens that lets in >3.5x more light. If you wanted to take portraits with very shallow depth of field with Olympus (possible with the Tamron lens), you would have to buy a dedicated prime (and one could always find a brighter prime, often for a used one for much less money in the 35mm full-frame world).

Even on the long end, advancements from Canon/Nikon/Sony (such as DO and PF lenses as well as very high-resolution sensors with excellent noise performance) meant that Olympus' advantage was disappearing. For example, all 300mm lenses with the same aperture share the same design and similar size. And yet 300mm f4 from Olympus weighs 1,474 g while 300mm f4 PF from Nikon weighs only 755 g -- twice less. Yes yes it's true that the Olympus comes with a 2x magnification factor. However one can make that up by using a camera with a very high-resolution sensor (such as the one in Z-7) or simply by using a teleconverter and taking advantage of higher noise performance of the full-frame sensor.

Ultimately the reason micro-four-thirds lenses were lighter was not because the system was better -- they were lighter because they were dimmer. The fact that this was not mentioned in most marketing materials made Olympus and Panasonic look quite bad -- and many interested prosumers (like myself) had felt the company was lying to them.

Not very familiar with video - what M43 camera do you use for that?

Probably the Panasonic GH Series.

There isn't a ton of value to the GH series for what I do, which is more video than film--I mostly shoot video game events (and I've been running a ton of them remotely since COVID started at https://twitch.tv/tracecomplete -- only need one camera for that, though!).

I like my GH4, but for photo it wasn't much better than the G7 and the G7 could shoot 4K60 and was about equivalent (again, for my purposes) when dumping to an external recorder.

The G9 with Firmware 2.0 has almost made the GH5 obsolete, too.

My three primary cameras right now are a LUMIX G9 (newest, the recent firmware upgrades put it on par with the GH5 for what I do and it has a full-size HDMI port which matters a lot), a GH4, and a G7; my off-cam/desk webcam is now my oldest camera, which is a GH3. The latter three all have the same sensor but the GH3 is a lot slower and has worse dynamic range and internal processing.

Gosh, this is educational. I've always assumed (as a happy Olympus user) that m43 was mostly a photography format, and video people were all using Canons.

I've recently been hooking up my Olympus as a webcam, through tedious necessity - and of course it took a bit of adapting. I had no idea any mirrorless camera had a standard full-size HDMI port on it.

I know some Canon video people, and they definitely have a reason to do that at the "big" end (C100 and up): the Canon autofocus stuff is the real deal. But I don't shoot dynamic environments for video--I run video game events and mostly shoot static angles (players, commentary, the venue, etc.). In my realm--not film, but video--what I see on the high end are Sony A7's and Blackmagic Pocket Cinemas (the 4K is M43, the 6K is EF-mount), with a lot of LUMIXes and a few (very few) Canon mirrorlesses. Some people use Fujis they already own for photo stuff. Nikon does not exist.

The G9 and GH5 both have full-size HDMI (the GH4 does with the bottom adapter we all call "the Brick") and lemme tell you: it is a life-changer. Having to balance micro-HDMI (G7, GH4) and mini-HDMI (GH3) cables were bad enough and I look forward to adding more G9's to the kit so I can stop doing it entirely.

Video is a real rabbit hole, though, and not having to spend wild money on video cameras for completely acceptable quality has really helped me out. The way I typically run is that I go from the camera to a Blackmagic HDMI->SDI micro converter, but those top out at 1080p60--which is fine, currently, for stream-first stuff, but I'd like to move to "stream at 1080p, record for YouTube at 4K" as I turn my event production stuff into a real business--so I've added a Blackmagic Quad HDMI capture card that all of these cameras can just throw 4K60 at natively. Of course, SDI cables can run 100 feet and HDMI starts getting mad around 15, so there are baluns in my future, too...it's all weird.

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