Olympus OM-D EM1 MarkII
(Reviewed with M. Zuiko 12-100mm F4 IS PRO)

25th December 2016, Singapore – Olympus Singapore recently sent me the new OM-D EM1 MarkII just in time for Christmas 2016 – and it came with the new M.Zuiko 12-100mm F4 IS PRO lens which had received many excellent reviews and accolades. When I received the package I was thrilled, here I have one of the best Olympus camera body fitted to one of the best Olympus Pro Lens – and I am ready for Christmas!

Before we proceed with the review, I would like to (again) share that if you ended up here looking for technical in-depth review, then you are certainly in the wrong place. Over here we are only keen how the camera & lens behaved & performed, the image quality etc. If you are cool with this, read on.

The Olympus OM-D EM1 MarkII had been creating raves after raves by both Professional users and the casual users. This camera was designed to change the photography landscape and how the shallow ones viewed the micro four thirds camera. The OM-D EM1 MarkII was really designed for the professional photographers if you take a closer look at the specifications. The camera packs a slightly larger M43 CMOS sensor with 21 megapixels, dual memory card slots,  built-in 5-axis sensor-shift image stabilization, 2.36 million dots EVF, touch control, 7 steps image color & kelvin control, 121 focus points, focus peaking, ISO from 64 to 256000, shutter speed topping at 1/8000, sequential shooting frames count of 99 frames, tons of art filters and shooting options plus a whole load more! It will take ages to fully try out all the functions of the EM1 MarkII as Olympus really had packed together an excellent camera “combo” that is capable of achieving many “impossibles” for a Micro Four Third camera.
*For full specs of the Olympus OM-D EM1 MarkII please kindly visit Olympus Singapore’s website.

The new Olympus M.Zuiko 12-100mm IS F4 Pro lens that came with the Olympus OM-D EM1 MarkII is a monster on its own. This PRO series lens comes with its own image stabilizer  – just image what I can do with this lens when I pair it with the EM1 MarkII’s built-in 5 axis sensor shift image stabilizer. Equivalent to 24-200mm (35mm format), this is like the all-in-one-lens that we always wanted!

The 12-100mm PRO weights just a mere 561gm and it is average sized 116mm x 77mm, accepts 72mm screw-on filter at the front and it has its own image stabilizer. So when I paired it with the OM-D EM1 MarkII’s in-body 5-axis sync image stabilizer, this combo gives me an insane 6.5 stops of correction allowing me to shoot with really slow shutter without a tripod – hahaha! Power!

This 12-100mm PRO comes weather-sealed and feels really comfortable in my hands. Ergonomically well designed and grippy to use. Internally, it has 17 elements in 11 groups and take a closer look, this is one hell of a lens. Among the elements, there’s 01 dual-sided aspherical element, 03 other asperical elements, 05 ED elements, 01 HR element and 02 Super HR elements. Do not forget the Zuiko comes with Z Coating (Nano) too for all the corrections and rendering!

So I took the OM-D EM1 MarkII with the 12-100mm PRO mounted and head out to Orchard recently during 2016 Christmas and came back with all the below shots. All images are clickable to enlarge so you can see all the details captured on these un-edited images!

The image quality are out of this world! While some may lament that this body+lens is well worth SGD $4K+, but after using it, I can only say that it will be money well-spent! Colors are accurate, i get the zoom range that I needed without having to compromise on image quality, the ISO is very, very clean, I have no complaints!

The bokeh is nice as seen from the above example, coming from a zoom lens, this is a bonus. The subject in focus is sharp and well defined while the out of focus area are nicely “off”, very easy to get my desired effects. I got my shots almost every time!

So what can 6.5 stops of image stabilizer do? See the next 2 images!
If you are not impressed by now, you are probably a tripod purist!

Check out the below scene.

I selected a portion (Red Box) – about 1/28 of the actual image size.

I cropped the small red box and see what remains in the next image below!

OK, for the parting shot, here’s an image of my rabbit Bingo Lee.

In conclusion, the Olympus OM-D EM1 MarkII + the M. Zuiko 12-100mm Pro lens is a very competent combo giving users the added edge over many other cameras+lens combo out there. As a frequent traveler, I would love to have this combo for my every trip as it covered almost 80% of the genres that I like to shoot when abroad. As mentioned earlier, this combo is not cheap at retail prices – but hey, quality don’t comes cheap either!

As I reluctantly return the camera & lens to Olympus, I am hoping they will loan me this combo again for my 2017 trip to Taiwan-Okinawa. Japan. (How Olympus Singapore? Can?)

Editor AL with the ultimate Olympus Combo.

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Editor’s Note: Thank you Olympus Singapore!

OK Guys, Buy your Olympus gear here.

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