Olympus EM-1 MkIII announced

[Chris Ross]

Olympus have just announced the EM-1 MkIII : Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark III initial review

The body looks very close to the MkII, but looks like they have done just enough with buttons to make using MkII housing difficult. The rear screen/EVF button has moved slightly and the menu button is right next to it now plus the info button is now a joystick.

Some interesting new features but not too much for the UW shooter. It now has 7 stop stabilisation, improved weather sealing (IPX-1) and new face and eye AF algorithm. There is also a live ND mode and handheld high res modes. The weather sealing sounds impressive - rated for 10 minutes in the equivalent of 1mm/minute rainfall.

 

[bvanant]

Even if it will fit in the Nauticam MII housing, it is not clear that it would be worth the money to upgrade. If it means yet another new housing, I will pass. On the technical side, do you think it will be possible to get u4/3 sensors much bigger than 20 MP.
Bill

 

[Chris Ross]

Why do you want more MP? the pixels are already down at 3.3 microns, which compares to the 4.5 micron pixels on a SONY A7RIII and the 3.7 micron pixels on the A7RIV. The noise performance has flattened out somewhat on sensors and recent gains have been in dynamic range and bit depth.

Fundamentally you are limited at a pixel level by how much light a small pixel can gather - which tends to limit how much you can crop before you run into noise and other issues eating into your image quality. From an overall image point of view you are limited by sensor area- the performance of equivalent technology sensors should be the same per unit area - so an APS-C version of say a Sony sensor should produce a pretty much equivalent image to one cropped out a full frame SONY camera of the same generation chip.

Must say I agree that the incentive to upgrade for an UW photographer is minimal, but it would be nice to have the option of modifying the housing to use the newer model down the track.

 

[Interceptor121]

There are higher megapixels sensor MFT sony released one last year. It has to be seen if it can be managed overall by the rest of the camera electronics
Phones have 100 megapixels so there is a way I suppose

 

[bvanant]

If it is only the back that needs changing then it shouldn't be too hard, I think that there was a way to modify a Nauticam Sony housing to upgrade to a new camera a while back. I was hoping for a BSI sensor that could get smaller pixels with equivalent low light performance and an uptick in pixels but not at the expense of high ISO performance. The new Sony sensor has 47 MP and they claim lower power usage which suggest a BSI type sensor. In any case, I just got a second OM-D EM1 Mark II so I am set for a while (at least that's what I tell my wife).
Bill