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OM System OM-1 First Shots: Lab Sample Images from the first Micro Four Thirds camera with a stacked BSI sensor
posted Tuesday, March 1, 2022 at 5:15 PM EDT
Click here to browse our OM SYSTEM OM-1 First Shots
A few weeks back, OM Digital Solutions, the new camera company spun out of Olympus' Digital Imaging division, unveiled their first "OM System"-branded camera, the OM-1. The successor to the popular Olympus E-M1 Mark III, and in a sense the E-M1X as well, the new OM System OM-1 maintains a familiar yet refined and updated physical design to its E-M1 III predecessor but packs in an all-new imaging pipeline.
Both the sensor and processor are all-new, with the OM-1 debuting the first stacked BSI CMOS sensor in a Micro Four Thirds camera. The resolution, however, remains similar to its predecessor at 20.4-megapixels. The stacked sensor design, however, helps the OM-1 achieve some staggering performance features, such as up to 50fps shooting with C-AF or 150fpf (!) with single-shot AF as well as performance improvements to autofocus. Combined with the newer, faster imaging processor, the TruePic X, the OM-1 also gains a new, broader ISO range, offering a much higher extended ISO range than the E-M1 III before it. The native ISO range remains the same at ISO 200-25600, but you can extend the sensitive downwards to ISO 80 and ISO 100 as well as beyond the native high ISO level, at up to ISO 102400 -- making it one of the highest-sensitivity Micro Four Thirds cameras on the market.
While many cameras' highest extended ISOs are usually of questionable usability, the OM-1 is, nonetheless, said to offer improved higher ISO performance compared to its predecessor, one which used a more conventional sensor design. In real-world testing from Jeremy Gray, the OM-1 did indeed show excellent higher ISO performance and an improvement over the E-M1 III. However, as always, lab-testing is also needed.
Without further ado, if you're curious about how the new OM System OM-1's image quality looks across the camera's full ISO range, check out our set of standardized First Shots sample images. As always, we have multiple image series to browse through and pixel peep. Here, files labeled with "NR2D" indicated images with the OM-1's default level of in-camera noise reduction processing. Meanwhile, the images labeled with "NR0" indicate in-camera NR processing has been disabled -- to the amount that OM System allows it, that is. We, of course, also have unedited corresponding RAW files to accompany the JPEG images. Additionally, the OM-1 has a built-in High-Res Shot mode, much like its predecessor, and we have an ISO series with these higher-resolution 80MP RAWs and JPEGs for download, as well.
