Olympus OM-D E-M5 Samples

The Olympus OM-D E-M5 is known to deliver the very best image quality from a Micro Four-Thirds digital camera to date. To evaluate the advantage of sensor-size with current technology, here we compare it to state-of-the-art 16 megapixels APS-C and Full-Frame sensors from the Pentax K-5
Pentax K-5 and the Nikon D4
Nikon D4 respectively.

Even though noise-reduction is turned off on all these cameras, they each takes a different approach to image processing which is why the crops look so different. However, it is clear that the gap between Micro-Four Thirds and APS-C is much smaller than between APS-C and Full-Frame. This makes sense since the surface area of an APS-C sensor is closer to Four-Thirds than to Full-Frame.

APS-C currently shows a visible lead over Micro Four-Thirds from ISO 400 to 6400, while Full-Frame leads from ISO 400 to 25600 and beyond. The comparison stops at 25600 because that is the maximum sensitivity of the OM-D E-M5.