Olympus E-M1 Performance

Excellent performance overall for a compact system camera.

Startup time including taking a shot was quite fast for a CSC, at well under a second. With a fast 95MB/s UHS-I SDHC card, the E-M1's buffer clearing times were quite good given the generous buffer depths.

Mode switching was quite fast, except for Record to Play which was quite slow.

The Olympus E-M1's full-autofocus shutter lag in single-area AF mode (center AF position) was only 0.139 second when tested with the new 12-40mm f/2.8 lens. That's incredibly fast for a compact system camera and faster than most DSLRs as well. To see how much the lens makes a difference and to compare to the E-M5, we also tested with the 14-42mm R II lens. With it, shutter lag increased to 0.193s, but that's still faster than the E-M5's 0.236s result with the same lens.

In 81-point "All Targets" AF mode, shutter lag was essentially the same as center AF mode, at 0.138 second. Full autofocus shutter lag increased to 0.269 second with the flash enabled, to account for the additional delay for the preflash metering, however that's still quite fast.

When manually focused, the E-M1's shutter lag time was only 0.068 second, also very fast. The E-M1's prefocused shutter lag time of 0.047 second was very quick.

An option to reduce shutter lag is available, however it often did not make a measurable difference in our tests and sometimes actually increased lag slightly.

To minimize the effect of different lens' focusing speed, we test AF-active shutter lag with the lens already set to the correct focal distance.

Single-shot cycle times were quite good for a CSC, at about 0.5 seconds per shot no matter the type of file.

Continuous H mode performance was excellent, at around 9.9 frames per second with any file type. We must point out that I.S. must be disabled, and focus, exposure and white balance are fixed at the first frame of a burst in this mode. There is also a "low speed" mode rated at up to 6.5 fps which supports continuous AF and exposure, however we didn't test that mode.

Buffer depths were excellent, at 50 frames for large/super fine JPEGs or RAW files, and 34 frames for RAW+JPEGs. Note that our test target for this was designed to be difficult to compress, so JPEG burst lengths should be longer with typical subjects. Buffer clearing time was also quite good considering the deep buffers, ranging from 13 seconds after a burst of 50 JPEGs, to 26 seconds after a burst of 34 RAW+JPEG frames.

Flash recycle time was a little slow with the bundled flash, though, at an average of 4.9 seconds after full power discharge. Larger flash units with their own power source would do much better.

Download speeds were quite fast, quick enough that you probably won't feel the need for a separate card reader. (Note that this test was performed with a SanDisk Extreme Pro 95MB/sec UHS-I SDHC card: Slower cards would likely show slower transfer times.)

Bottom line, the Olympus E-M1's performance is generally excellent, and faster on almost all fronts compared to the E-M5, with much deeper buffers as well.

Battery Life
Average battery life for a CSC.

The Olympus E-M1 uses a custom rechargeable lithium-ion battery pack for power, and comes with both a single battery and charger. The rated 350 shots per charge (Olympus makes no distinction between using the EVF or LCD monitor) is about average for a compact system camera, but well below the capacity of most DSLRs with their optical viewfinders. We recommend getting a second battery for your E-M1 if you plan any extended outings, and consider purchasing the HLD-7 power grip to increase battery life to about 680 shots.

The table above shows the number of shots the camera is capable of (on a fully-charged rechargeable battery), based on CIPA battery-life and/or manufacturer standard test conditions.

(Interested readers can find an English translation of the CIPA DC-002 standards document here. (180K PDF document))