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Olympus History and Product Overview

Now first thing to kind of dive into and I know it's for some people it's the boring thing but just a bit of olympus is history is they've been around for a long time and they have a particular style and way of doing things their first olympus camera little well semi olympus won was semi olympus which I think is kind of a funny name on that uh going back to nineteen fifty nine they made their first pen camera and one of the things that I would say distinguishes olympus from other manufacturers is they like small cameras and so they really pride themselves on making high quality very small cameras which I think this camera fits very well into and if you kind of wanted to go back to the history on this camera what you want to do is you want to go all the way back to nineteen seventy three and look at the olympus oh am siri's I can't o stands for olympus m stands for I'm not sure quite sure how to pronounce this but it's a tiny and this is the guy who designed the camera and so that's whe...

re the o m in olympus the camera's name comes from so mateen e was the designer of this cameron wanted to make the smallest but high quality thirty five millimeter camera of the day and they were very popular throughout the seventies and eighties in nineteen nineteen eighty six they came out with their first digital camera which was point the re megapixels I believe this camera's sold for a thousand dollars retail because I had I remember selling it in the store in two thousand three they brought out what's called the four thirds system where we're going to talk more about this as we get in to the camera in detail and then in two thousand nine they brought out the micro for third system which this is what this camera is is part of the micro for third system and once again they're trying to really stay with the theme of a small compact high quality camera so this for third system was kind of a new system put together by olympus and panasonic and they also had like involved and at the time kodak involved in this project where there was going to be a smaller size sensor smaller size cameras that had fully interchangeable lenses and so what they wanted to do in order to make a smaller size camera is that they made a fairly small sensor which is known as a fourth third sensor and you can see in reference to the thirty five millimeter full frame camera it is a noticeably smaller frame then it which means they were able to make smaller lenses and smaller cameras now the four thirds refers to the aspect ratio it's a forty three aspect ratio compared the two the one to one point five aspect ratio of the full frame. It also refers to the lens mount that is being used on the camera. And so it has a particular lens. Mt that's, different than previous olympus cameras or other brands of cameras and four thirds is a certain size of mountain type of bayonet system on it. So that is what four thirds is. And so olympus had a number of four thirds cameras out and they looked like basically for the most part really small well they weren't really small they were slightly smaller than your typical dslr sze the problem was is that they weren't that much smaller but they had a much smaller size sensor and they had a whole lens system for it now these lenses proved not to be two popular the whole system the fourth third system proved not prove to be not too popular and so they wanted to reduce it things even further so they introduced a micro for third system and so you have to be very careful when you're looking at lenses it might be an olympus lands it might be a fourteen to forty two but is it a four thirds or a micro for third system very important because they're very different lenses and they do not work directly on the camera and here 00:03:58.173 --> 00:04:02. is the reason why the original four thirds single 00:04:02.25 --> 00:04:06. lens reflex camera worked like many of the traditional 00:04:06.12 --> 00:04:08. single lens reflex cameras which means that light 00:04:08.84 --> 00:04:11. came in and hit a mere which is the reflex portion 00:04:11.87 --> 00:04:14. in it bounce the light up through a viewfinder so 00:04:14.23 --> 00:04:17. you could see what's going on now in order for this 00:04:17.01 --> 00:04:19. system tau work the mere in there you have to have 00:04:19.99 --> 00:04:22. a fair bit of space between the lens mount and the 00:04:22.58 --> 00:04:25. image sensor and this is called a flinch distance 00:04:25.49 --> 00:04:28. and it needs to be a certain size in order to make 00:04:28.02 --> 00:04:30. the cameras smaller olympus remove the mirror which 00:04:30.72 --> 00:04:33. is why they call it a mere elice camera removed the 00:04:33.49 --> 00:04:36. traditional prison system and they were able to make 00:04:36.18 --> 00:04:40. a smaller camera with smaller size lenses and that's 00:04:40.23 --> 00:04:43. how we get to the mirror less camera and that is what 00:04:43.99 --> 00:04:47. has become the micro for third system so micro four 00:04:47.61 --> 00:04:51. thirds basically means it's a mirror lis system and 00:04:51.17 --> 00:04:54. so comparing the micro for thirds against the four 00:04:54.56 --> 00:04:58. thirds is that they have the exact same size sensor 00:04:58.17 --> 00:05:02. on them they have the same lens mount on them but 00:05:02.01 --> 00:05:05. they have a different set of lenses that are designed 00:05:05.04 --> 00:05:07. for them and we'll talk about this as we get into 00:05:07.75 --> 00:05:10. the lens recommendations of this particular camera 00:05:11.94 --> 00:05:15. now if you do happen to have some of their older four 00:05:15.26 --> 00:05:18. thirds lenses you can use those lenses on this camera 00:05:18.73 --> 00:05:22. body with the m m f three adapter sells for about 00:05:22.84 --> 00:05:25. one hundred sixty bucks and that allows you to use 00:05:25.67 --> 00:05:29. four thirds lenses to a micro four thirds camera I 00:05:29.3 --> 00:05:31. don't see a lot of people doing that because well, 00:05:31.87 --> 00:05:33. they frankly didn't have a lot of those lenses out 00:05:33.84 --> 00:05:35. there and there were a lot of people who bought into 00:05:35.44 --> 00:05:39. that system but the muralist system has far exceeded 00:05:39.08 --> 00:05:41. it in popularity. So it's much, much more popular 00:05:41.3 --> 00:05:44. system, so just be aware of part of that history now 00:05:44.2 --> 00:05:47. one of the things about being a fearless camera is 00:05:47.49 --> 00:05:52. that you can use an adapter to use almost any lens 00:05:52.12 --> 00:05:55. ever made on this camera now those adapters will range 00:05:55.7 --> 00:05:59. in price with a wide ranging quality but you can adapt 00:05:59.26 --> 00:06:01. all sorts of those older lenses from the sixties, seventies, eighties and so forth you can adapt other more modern lenses safe from nikon or canon and use it on this camera there are a lot of limitations for instance, you are unlikely to get auto focus with any of them so you might have to do stop down meet ary and in theory this is great because you could make use of all these older lenses impracticality I find them very inconvenient to use and if you can find ah four thirds lens which there are lots to choose from I would much rather use one of those than any of these adapters but if you do want to play around and experiment it's a neat way of doing it now there is also a special type of adapter and they're a couple of them out there one I'll draw attention to is one from meta bones called the speed booster this one has optical elements in it whereas most of the others do not and what this does is it refocuses the image coming through the lens to fit the smaller size sensor and it will actually increase the brightness of the image because working with the other types of adapters you're simply getting a cropped image whereas with the speed booster it's focusing the light like a flashlight that can adjust its beam onto the censor and you can get a little bit wider angle view and it increases the light gathering ability of the lens so it's kind of a neat little device it does sell for a bit more money and it's available fewer options on lenses that you could mount onto it but it's a neat little option than and there are some people who absolutely love it now it does add optical elements and so you are starting to play with the optical formula which means it's not going to improve the quality. It may not affected too much or it could affect a lot depending on the exact parameters that you have set this forest. What lens in what adapter you are using so the current micro four thirds family from olympus includes basically two types of cameras the pen siri's cameras which are noted by the fact that they do not have internal viewfinders eye level viewfinders they have screens on the back but not an eye level viewfinder the om de siri's which is very reminiscent of the old liam sl. Ours has the noticeable hump in the middle and they have an eye level view finder and I personally find having an eye level view finder is a major benefit when shooting photos outside especially under fairly bright light conditions being able to hold the camera up to your eye you'll be able to see sharpness much better you'll be able to see composition easier and it's actually little bit more steady way of holding the camera so I highly recommend the only indie series of cameras I think they're just very, very useful. The five mark to kind of sits in the middle the there is the higher and a little bit more professional iam won the m five mark too I think it's going to hit a sweet spot for a lot of people and for many people is kind of the best buy because you're you're getting a lot of features, but you're still keeping the size and weight of the camera down the e m one does have a little bit more customizable features and a few more controls on the outside because the body is a little bit bigger in size there they're all very good cameras. They all have very similar image quality so it's more or less controls and features on the cameras what you're buying now as you get into the instruction manual. If you do happen to make it fifteen or twenty pages in, you're going to find all sorts of warnings about not using this in a hospital or onboard an aircraft or doing incredibly dumb things with it on we could just be simple and just say, don't be stupid with your camera there is one question that a lot of people have and that is aboutthe waterproof nous of this camera and they do list it as dust splash free spoof and it is made of a full magnesium alloy construction so it is a very strong body on this but you do also have to be careful because not all the lenses are weather resistant some are and some are not and you'll have to look into the specifics of the particular lenses that they have for instance, the olympus kind of pro lenses I have on the camera right here in case you're interested the twelve to forty millimeter lands and this is their high end f two point eight normal zoom lens now this one is whether resistant see if I can show you here I don't get a really tight shot in here but there's a little weather seal around the edge and this we'll seal up with the body and prevent water from getting in in this particular location throughout the lens in other locations they'll have additional rubber seals which make this a weather resistant lands and so this is a nice match on this camera because it provides a nice complete weather package other lenses for instance the forty five here this one does not have any weather seals around the back side of it all and so that's just one way of checking but there are other seals depending on the zoom and the focus ring on the lens itself and so I got to check into the lenses on that particular one and john I already have people asking questions about lenses so we are going to be covering the more in depth is that crack later and that is correct I have one section onl ends is that we're not going to go over all the lenses but I'm going to go over some of what I would consider my recommended lenses and some of the features and just some of the some of the uses of them so that will be coming at the end of the control section all right great. So it's stay tuned everyone all right moving forward so preparing the camera so if you own the camera right now and you want to kind of have everything ready first off you need to charge and install the battery they say it'll take about four hours to charge you should get around three hundred thirty shots one of the notes of gripe and it's not really on this camera but it is on muralist cameras is that we are using an electronic display which sucks up a bit more battery life and so marylise cameras in general will get a about one third the battery life of many of the sl ours and so if this is your camera and it's very important for what you're doing I would highly recommend getting a backup battery is that you always have a backup battery ready to go because you never know how many pictures you're gonna end up shooting, how much video you're going to shoot, how much of that display screen that you're going to be using. So if you're gonna be going out for a long day, it might be good to have a backup battery or at the very least, make sure that your batteries fully charged when you head out the door, so make sure you go ahead and attach the land's put in a memory card because we're gonna be taking some practice pictures in here. Go ahead, turn the camera on, and to be honest with you, it kills me to say this, turn the camera to the eye auto mo this is the most simple mode on the camera. I'm going to do that right now for myself and go ahead and take a picture. I just want to make sure the camera is working so let's, go ahead and take a picture here. Excellent. Okay, now I have a record of the day.