Olympus E-P5 Performance

Very good performance overall for a compact system camera.

Startup time including taking a shot was quite fast for a CSC, at under a second. With a fast 95MB/s UHS-I SDHC card, the E-P5's buffer clearing times were excellent given the generous buffers.

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

The Olympus E-P5's full-autofocus shutter lag in single-area AF mode (center AF position) was only 0.196 second with the 17mm f/1.8 kit lens. That's faster than most consumer DSLRs these days, and faster than many prosumer DSLRs are well. In 35-point "All Targets" AF mode, this time increased slightly to 0.231 second, which is still very fast, especially for a contrast-detection system. Full autofocus shutter lag increased to 0.318 second with the flash enabled, which includes an additional delay for the preflash metering. Continuous AF mode resulted in a shutter lag of only 0.144 second with a static subject.

When manually focused, the E-P5's lag time was 0.098 second, which is pretty fast. The E-P5's prefocused lag time of 0.054 second was quite fast. An option to reduce shutter lag (likely by enabling an electronic first curtain) shaved 0.002 second from our default mode prefocused shutter lag result. That's much less than Olympus' claim of a 20% reduction, though not far from the 0.049 second shutter lag the company claims for this mode.

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. This actually exceeds Olympus' spec of 9.0 fps, though we must point out that I.S. must be disabled, and focus and exposure are fixed at the first frame of a burst in this mode. There is also a L mode rated at up to 5.0 fps. (We didn't test that mode.) 

Buffer depths were quite good, at 16 frames for large/super fine JPEGs, 18 for RAW files, and 15 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 was also quite good, ranging from 5 seconds after a max-length burst of JPEGs, to 10 seconds after a burst or RAW+JPEG frames.

Flash recycle time was good with built-in flash, at 3.4 seconds after a full power discharge.

Download speeds were fairly 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-P5's performance is generally very good for a CSC, and faster on almost all fronts compared to the E-P3, especially cycle times and burst modes.

Battery Life
Slightly below average battery life for a CSC.

The Olympus E-P5 uses a custom rechargeable lithium-ion battery pack for power, and comes with both a single battery and charger. The rated 330 shots per charge is a bit below average for a compact system camera, and well below the capacity of most DSLRs with their optical viewfinders. We recommend getting a second battery for your E-P5 if you plan any extended outings.

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))