Olympus E-PL5 Raw Comparison

Olympus E-PL5 RAW Comparison

See crops below to compare the Olympus E-PL5's (12-bit) RAW image quality to its big brother, as well as a few recent compact system cameras.

As you can see, noise in E-PL5 RAW files is very similar to its big brother, the E-M5. The E-PL5 also does better than the 16-megapixel Panasonic G5 and the 20-megapixel Samsung NX200. Excellent performance, though contrast in the red leaf swatch is a little low.

Here's a comparison with some moderately priced APS-C models.

The Fuji X-E1 Adobe Camera Raw conversions are by far the cleanest here, but they look as if some filtering has been applied, spreading out chroma noise and attenuating luminance noise while reducing acuity in the process. We're not sure if this is a deliberate attempt at noise reduction (something we don't like to see in RAW files), or just a by-product of the interpolation algorithm needed to demosaic the X-E1's unique 6x6 filter array.

The Olympus E-PL5 compares favorably to the cameras using conventional sensors, producing noise levels that are pretty much on par with the 16-megapixel Nikon D7000 and slightly better than the 18-megapixel Canon T4i. That's a remarkable achievement considering the E-PL5's pixel pitch is significantly smaller than both, at about 3.7µm versus 4.7µm for the D7000 and 4.2µm for the 7D.