The OM-D E-M5 III impressed me so much when I reviewed it that I immediately bought one. I was amazed that a camera this compact could also be this powerful. I also hold Olympus Pro lenses in high regard and tested it with the 12-40mm f/2.8 standard zoom, with its exceptional optical performance, which helped me make my mind up.
Yes, the 12-40mm was a bit big on the E-M5 body, but I would get used to that. I thought.
Well I didn’t. So I got the screw-on grip for the E-M5 III which made it better to hold with bigger lenses. It helped, but then it felt like a small camera made artificially big.
What really made my mind up was reviewing the OM System OM-5 for TechRadar, my camera’s replacement but physically identical. It was just not big enough, even with the smaller 12-45mm f/4 kit lens option.
So after about a year and a half of this I traded in the E-M5 III for a little-used E-M1 III and realised immediately that this was the camera I should have bought in the first place.
This was my first step in my growing realisation that I should be planning my camera system around the lenses I want and then picking the right camera. Usually, people do it the other way around.
I already had the M.Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8 and the equally excellent 7-14mm f/2.8 and what I needed was a camera body to suit them. The E-M5 III wasn’t it. The E-M1 III could itself do with being a fraction taller in the body for these lenses, but it’s much better balanced overall.
You can’t get the E-M1 III new from most resellers any more and while Olympus UK (where I live) is still selling it, it’s £1,600, which seems a lot. However, they are much cheaper used on MPB, and my E-M5 III has held its value well, so I ended up paying a difference of less than £300 (around $300) to get an E-M1 III in much the same condition as the camera I traded in.
I also have a bunch of compact MFT primes that do suit the E-M5 III very well, but I realised I was buying lenses to suit the camera, not the lenses I would necessarily have chosen on their own merits.
So what next? Now that I have a camera the right size, I might at last invest in the OM System 8-25mm f/4, a superb but hefty lens with a 16-50mm equivalent focal range, and perhaps my perfect ‘walkaround’ lens.
Amazing, isn’t it? Sometimes you have to buy the wrong thing to find out what the right thing was all along.