Olympus E-M10 II Exposure

Saturation & Hue Accuracy
Bright colors with very good hue accuracy.

Saturation. The Olympus E-M10 II pushes darker reds by a fair amount and a number of other colors moderately, but most colors are pretty close to accurate in terms of saturation. Default mean saturation at base ISO of 200 is 113.5% (13.5% oversaturated), which is a little higher than average. Mean saturation falls fairly gradually and only mildly as ISO rises, to a minimum of 108.3% at ISO 25,600 which is still quite vibrant for the sensitivity. Most consumer digital cameras produce color that's more highly saturated (more intense) than what's found in the original subjects. This is simply because most people like their color a bit brighter than life.

Skin tones. The Olympus E-M10 II did fairly well here when white balance was matched to the lighting, producing pleasant Caucasian skin tones that were just slightly on the warm side. Where oversaturation is most problematic is on Caucasian skin tones, as it's very easy for these "memory colors" to be seen as too bright, too pink, too yellow, etc.

Hue. The Olympus E-M10 II exhibits very good overall hue accuracy, with a better-than-average Delta-C color error after correction for saturation of only 3.91 at base ISO. And hue accuracy is very good across the ISO sensitivity range. Hue is "what color" the color is.

Exposure and White Balance

Indoors, incandescent lighting
Auto white balance struggled, but good color balance with Incandescent and Manual white balance settings. Average exposure compensation required.

Indoors, under normal incandescent lighting, color balance was much too warm and orange with the default Auto white balance setting. The E-M10 II has a "Keep Warm Color" option for Auto white balance which is On by default. When turned Off, the results were too cool with a cyan tint. Results with the Incandescent setting were not bad, though, just slightly cool. The Manual setting was pretty good, but with a very slight shift towards green. The Olympus E-M10 II required an average amount of positive exposure compensation here, at +0.3 EV. (Our test lighting for this shot is a mixture of 60 and 100 watt household incandescent bulbs, a pretty yellow light source, but a very common one in typical home settings here in the U.S.)

Outdoors, daylight
Realistic looking colors overall, with good exposure.

Outdoors, the Olympus E-M10 II performed well, with natural colors and good exposure. Skin tones are good but slightly warm and yellow with the Auto white balance setting in our "Sunlit" Portrait shot, so we preferred Manual white balance for is slightly pinker rendering. The Olympus E-M10 II required an average amount of positive exposure compensation (+0.7 EV) to keep the mannequin's face relatively bright. Default contrast is a bit high as it is from most cameras, but despite the bright appearance in some areas there are very few blown highlights in the mannequin's shirt and flowers, which is much better than average. And there are few lost shadows as well. The Far-field shot has very good exposure at default settings and almost no blown highlights or lost shadows. Noise in the shadows is fairly low, though there is often a lot of discoloration in very deep shadows. (Note that these shots were taken at ISO 200 as ISO 100 is an extended setting with inferior dynamic range.)

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Resolution
~2,400 lines of strong detail in native resolution JPEG and RAW files.

An in-camera JPEG of our laboratory resolution chart reveals sharp, distinct line patterns down to about 2,400 lines per picture height in the horizontal direction, and to about 2,400 lines in the vertical direction, although some strong aliasing is visible well before those limits. Complete extinction of the pattern doesn't occur until about 3,200 to 3,400 lines. Adobe Camera Raw wasn't really able to extract more resolution here but generated far less luminance aliasing, though false colors and color moiré are much more apparent past the limits of resolution. Use these numbers to compare with other cameras of similar resolution, or use them to see just what higher resolution can mean in terms of potential detail.

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Sharpness & Detail
Very sharp images though edge-enhancement artifacts on high-contrast subjects are visible. Mild noise suppression visible in the shadows.

Sharpness. The Olympus E-M10 II captures very sharp, crisp images overall, though as is often the case, edge enhancement artifacts are visible on high-contrast subjects when default settings are used, such as sharpening halos around the lines and lettering in the crop above left. However, images that look oversharpened when viewed on screen at 100% often look better when printed, and you can always turn down the in-camera sharpening if desired. Edge enhancement creates the illusion of sharpness by enhancing colors and tones right at the edge of a rapid transition in color or tone.

Detail. The crop above right shows fairly mild noise suppression artifacts in the darkest areas of the model's hair as base ISO, smudging individual strands together when contrast between them is low, though quite a few individual strands remain visible. Overall detail is very good for a 16-megapixel Micro Four Thirds model, and chroma noise in particular is well controlled. Noise-suppression systems in digital cameras tend to flatten-out detail in areas of subtle contrast. The effects can often be seen in shots of human hair, where the individual strands are lost and an almost "watercolor" look appears.

RAW vs In-Camera JPEGs
As noted above, the Olympus E-M10 II does a great job at capturing sharp images with lots of fine detail in its JPEGs, however more detail can often be obtained by carefully processing RAW files, while at the same time reducing sharpening artifacts. To see what we mean, take a look below:

In the table above, we compare an in-camera JPEG taken at base ISO using default noise reduction and sharpening (on the left) to the matching RAW file converted with DNG Converter 9.2/Adobe Camera Raw 9.1 using default noise reduction with some strong but tight unsharp masking applied in Photoshop (300%, radius of 0.3 pixels, and a threshold of 0).

As you can see, the Adobe Camera Raw conversion contains fine detail superior to the camera's Super Fine JPEG at default settings, especially in the red-leaf swatch where low-contrast detail is better and much of the thread pattern is resolved, though ACR does leave behind more noise at default noise reduction settings. The in-camera JPEG generally has more "pop," with higher contrast, sharpening and saturation, however you can always adjust those attributes in the conversion as well. Overall, the E-M10 II's JPEG engine does a very good job capturing most of the detail offered by its 16-megapixel sensor, at least at low ISOs. (And its expanded ISO 100 setting does even better, but at the cost of lower dynamic range.)

ISO & Noise Performance
Very good high ISO performance for its class.

The Olympus E-M10 II's images are quite clean and detailed at ISOs 100 through 400, though there's a minor increase in noise in the shadows as ISO rise within this range. ISO 800 shows a slight drop in overall image quality, but fine detail is still quite strong. At ISO 1600, we see some moderate detail loss due to stronger noise and noise reduction efforts, but fine detail is still pretty good. ISO 3200 is the first step in sensitivity where image quality suffers a large drop with much stronger blurring of fine detail and some noticeable chroma noise. Image quality drops off rapidly at ISO 6400 and above, with stronger noise, visible noise reduction and sharpening artifacts, as well as a shift in color towards green.

Overall, though, high ISO noise performance is competitive with the best we've seen from a Micro Four Thirds model thus far, and even competes well with some APS-C rivals. As always, see the Print Quality section below for maximum recommended print sizes at each ISO.

Note that we now shoot this series at f/8 instead of f/4, for increased depth of field (at f/4, it was very difficult to focus for maximum sharpness in the crop area while maintaining consistent focus between models).

Extremes: Sunlit, dynamic range and low light tests
High contrast but with very good dynamic range. Very good low-light performance as well.

Sunlight
The Olympus E-M10 II did very well with this difficult shot, requiring the average amount of exposure compensation (+0.7 EV) to keep the mannequin's face reasonably bright in this harsh lighting. As mentioned previously, despite the bright appearance of the mannequin's shirt, dynamic range is surprisingly good, with very few highlights blown and good detail in the shadows as well, though very deep shadows do sometimes exhibit blotchy discoloration or desaturation. Still, performance here is well above average, particularly for a Micro Four Thirds model.

Because digital cameras are more like slide film than negative film (in that they tend to have a more limited tonal range), we test them in the harshest situations to see how they handle scenes with bright highlights and dark shadows, as well as what kind of sensitivity they have in low light. The shot above is designed to mimic the very harsh, contrasty effect of direct noonday sunlight, a very tough challenge for most digital cameras. (You can read details of this test here. In actual shooting conditions, be sure to use fill flash in situations like the one shown here; it's better to shoot in open shade whenever possible.)

Face Detection. Like most cameras these days, the Olympus E-M10 II has the ability to detect faces, and adjust exposure and focus accordingly. As you can see from the examples above, it worked well, as the center image with face detection enabled is better exposed for the face without having to use exposure compensation. The Full Auto setting worked even better by choosing Portrait scene mode which selected a larger aperture (f/2) and applied i-Enhance and Auto Gradation to reduce strong shadows and highlights. An excellent performance under very difficult lighting such as this.

Gradation. Similar to dynamic range optimization systems from other manufacturers, the Olympus E-M10 II's Gradation setting applies local contrast adjustments in an attempt to preserve shadow detail and prevent highlight clipping with the Auto setting. Above are examples of the Normal (default), Auto, Low Key and High Key settings applied to our "Sunlit" Portrait shot with +0.3 exposure compensation. Mouse over the links to load the associated thumbnail and histogram, and click on the links to visit the full resolution image.

As you can see, the Low Key setting applies Gradation for making subjects darker (in the thumbnail and histogram above, you can see that the camera shifted levels to the left, darkening the image dramatically), while the High Key setting does the opposite for brighter images (shifting levels to the right so that lighter tones are blown, but darker ones are opened up). The Auto setting did a good job here, boosting shadows and midtones without blowing additional highlights, for a much better overall exposure.

Above, we can see the Gradation options at work in our Far-field test shot series. Mouse over the links to load the associated thumbnail, and click on the links to visit the full resolution image.

High Dynamic Range. The E-M10 II's in-camera HDR feature works by combining four shots at different exposures. Two strength settings are available: HDR1 and HDR2, with the later providing a more extreme result. ISO is fixed to 200, and slowest shutter speed is 1 second (4 seconds total).

Above, you can see the E-M10 II's in-camera HDR mode at work with our Far-field shot. HDR1 did a pretty good job brightening shadows and toning down highlights, though you can probably do better by using the bracketing mode and combining the images yourself in software. HDR2 mode looks overprocessed and too flat for this scene, with soft details.

Notice that the HDR images are not cropped compared to the non-HDR image, which can imply the camera does not microalign the source images, or at least can't compensate for much camera motion. This is pretty much confirmed by the user manual which says to use a tripod for HDR shots, potentially making this mode less useful than those offered by some other manufacturers, however we found we were able to capture some HDR images hand-held with no alignment issues.

Dynamic Range Analysis (RAW mode)
A key parameter in a digital camera is its Dynamic Range, the range of brightness that can be faithfully recorded. At the upper end of the tonal scale, dynamic range is dictated by the point at which the RGB data "saturates" at values of 255, 255, 255. At the lower end of the tonal scale, dynamic range is determined by the point at which there ceases to be any useful difference between adjacent tonal steps. Note the use of the qualifier "useful" in there: While it's tempting to evaluate dynamic range as the maximum number of tonal steps that can be discerned at all, that measure of dynamic range has very little relevance to real-world photography. What we care about as photographers is how much detail we can pull out of the shadows before image noise becomes too objectionable. This, of course, is a very subjective matter, and will vary with the application and even the subject matter in question. (Noise will be much more visible in subjects with large areas of flat tints and subtle shading than it would in subjects with strong, highly contrasting surface texture.)

While we once performed our own dynamic range measurements based on in-camera JPEGs as well as converted RAW images (when the camera was supported by Adobe Camera Raw), we've switched to using DxO Labs' results from their DxOMark website. As technology advanced, the dynamic range of modern high-end cameras in some cases exceeded the range of the Stouffer T4110 density scale that we used for our own measurements. DxO's approach based on RAW data before demosaicing is also more revealing, because it measures the fundamental dynamic range of the sensor, irrespective of whatever processing is applied to JPEGs, or to RAW data by off-the-shelf conversion software.

In the following, we use DxO's "Print" dynamic range results, which are scaled based on camera resolution. As the name suggests, this scaling corresponds to the situation in which you print at a given size, regardless of how many megapixels the camera might have. (In other words, if you've decided to make a 13x19 inch print, that's the size you're printing, whether the camera's resolution is 16 or 300 megapixels.) For the technically-minded, you can find a discussion of the reasoning behind this here on the DxOMark website. Also note that DxO Labs uses a signal-to-noise (SNR) threshold of 1 when defining the lower boundary of acceptable luminance noise in their dynamic range measurements, which corresponds to the "Low Quality" threshold of the Imatest software we used to use for this measurement.

Here, we compare the Olympus E-M10 II's dynamic range to a couple of competing cameras, the Canon T6i/750D DSLR and the Sony A6000 mirrorless ILC. (DxOMark dynamic range test results for the E-M10 II are very similar to the E-M10, so we didn't compare them here.)

As you can see from the above graph (click for a larger version), the E-M10 II's dynamic range (in orange) is actually slightly better than the Canon T6i's (yellow) at lower ISOs, producing a peak value of about 12.5 EV versus 12 EV for the Canon at base ISO. Above ISO 800, the Canon however overtakes the E-M10 II, but again only slightly, helped by its higher resolution which is an advantage in normalized comparisons like this.

The E-M10 II's dynamic range isn't as good as the Sony (red), particularly at base ISO where the A6000 manages 13.1 EV vs 12.5 EV, but keep in mind the E-M10 II's base ISO setting is 200 versus 100 for the Sony, plus again the Sony's resolution is higher from a larger APS-C sensor. The Sony continues to do better than the Olympus across the ISO range, varying from almost equal at ISO 200 to up to about a full stop better at ISO 12,800.

Still, the Olympus E-M10 II offers impressive dynamic range for a Micro Four Thirds camera. Click here to visit the DxOMark page for the Olympus E-M10 II for more of their test results and additional comparisons.

Low Light
The Olympus E-M10 II performed quite well in low lighting, capturing bright exposures at the lowest light level we test (1/16 foot-candle), even at base ISO. Noise is low at ISO 200 and well-controlled at ISO 3200, though the top ISO 25,600 is noisy as you'd expect, and is probably best avoided except for small prints or web images. We didn't notice any significant issues with fixed pattern noise, heat blooming or hot pixels.

White balance was fairly neutral using the Auto setting, just slightly cool.

The camera's autofocus system was able to focus on our subject down to below the 1/16 foot-candle light level unassisted with an f/2.8 lens, which is excellent, and in total darkness with the aid of its focus assist lamp.

How bright is this? The one foot-candle light level that this test begins at roughly corresponds to the brightness of typical city street-lighting at night. Cameras performing well at that level should be able to snap good-looking photos of street-lit scenes.

NOTE: This low light test is conducted with a stationary subject, and the camera mounted on a sturdy tripod. Most digital cameras will fail miserably when faced with a moving subject in dim lighting. (For example, a child's ballet recital or a holiday pageant in a gymnasium.) Thanks to their phase-detect AF systems, digital SLRs tend to do much better than point & shoots, but you still shouldn't expect a quick autofocus lock with moving subjects. The E-M10 II uses contrast-detect autofocus as is found in most point & shoot cameras, so its low-light focusing ability is less than that of most SLRs with phase-detect systems. That said, though, the larger, more sensitive pixels of the E-M10 II's sensor do better under dim lighting than do the tiny pixels of most point & shoots, (A useful trick is to just prop the camera on a convenient surface, and use its self-timer to release the shutter. This avoids any jiggling from your finger pressing the shutter button, and can work quite well when you don't have a tripod handy.)

Print Quality
Excellent 24 x 36 inch prints at ISO 100/200; a nice 13 x 19 at ISO 3200; and a good 4 x 6 at ISO 12,800.

ISO 100/200 images are excellent at 24 x 36 inches, with sharp detail and rich colors throughout our test target. Prints are usable for wall display purposes up to 36 x 48 inches from a normal viewing distance.

ISO 400 prints are similar to the E-M10 II's predecessor, the E-M10, with 24 x 36 inch prints showing just a slight bit too much noise in flatter areas to secure our "good" rating. While okay for less critical applications, a reduction to 20 x 30 inches tightens the image up nicely here.

ISO 800 shots also allow for 20 x 30 inch prints, just passing our "good" standard. There is a slight trace of noise visible in the flatter areas of our test target, but there's a nice amount of fine detail still present overall.

ISO 1600 requires a reduction in print size to 16 x 20 inches, which is still a nice, large print for this sensor size at this sensitivity. The print is beginning to show some loss of contrast detail in our target's tricky red-leaf swatch, but otherwise makes for quite a good image in general.

ISO 3200 prints hold up quite well at 13 x 19 inches, with plenty of good high-contrast detail and retaining good color reproduction.

ISO 6400 shows similar results as those we've reported in many a Micro Four Thirds camera, with image quality degrading rather abruptly and requiring a reduction in print size to 8 x 10 inches. Even at this size there is still a trace of noise in flatter areas, and all contrast detail is gone from our target red-leaf swatch. For this reason, remaining at ISO 3200 and lower is best for most Micro Four Thirds cameras for all but less critical applications.

ISO 12,800 yields a 5 x 7 inch print that almost passes our good rating. It's okay for less critical needs, but we'll pin the 4 x 6 inch print here with our official "good" seal of approval.

ISO 25,600 is not terrible at 4 x 6 inches, but is too noisy to earn our good rating and is best avoided in most cases.

The Olympus E-M10 II continues in the tradition Olympus has set of producing quality cameras in their OM-D and PEN lines that are capable of delivering high quality images in prints up to ISO 3200. At higher ISO sensitivities, prints begin to noticeably suffer from either too much noise or a lack of detail, but remaining at ISO 3200 and lower will leave you happy with your results in the print quality department with the E-M10 II.