Olympus E-5 Samples

The Olympus E-5 is compared to its closest competitor, the Pentax K-5
Pentax K-5, below. All images below are 100% unmodified crops from their respective cameras. Both cameras were set on aperture-priority mode with fixed ISO. By default, the E-5 uses aggressive noise-reduction which is even visible at low ISO, this caused its images to look incredible soft compare to the K-5, so we turned off noise-reduction on both cameras for this set. The remaining settings were left on automatic. These crops help determine which ISO settings can be acceptably used on these cameras. As noise increases, most cameras compensate with noise reduction which introduces softness. The point at which a print become unacceptably noisy is a matter of personal taste.

Olympus E-5	Pentax K-5
ISO 100	ISO 100
ISO 200	ISO 200
ISO 400	ISO 400
ISO 800	ISO 800
ISO 1600	ISO 1600
ISO 3200	ISO 3200
ISO 6400	ISO 6400
It is clear that the K-5 has a lead in terms of high-ISO capabilities here, giving it an edge of about 1 full stop. This is still very good for the E-5 which as a smaller sensor with a crop-factor of 2X rather than 1.5X.	ISO 12800
	ISO 25600
	ISO 51200