OK so more thoughts on the OM-1 having played with it at lunchtime at our local nature reserve near work.
The new AF system is frankly amazing. I had it set to Bird detect with cross centre cluster (no tracking), and even tiny song birds quite a distance away (that even with the 300mm F4 and severely cropping would still be very small in the frame), the OM-1 picked them up instantly and draw a box round them and even (where possible), picked up the eye. I took nearly 500 shots (trying out the different drive modes), and I would say 90-95% of them are tack sharp. Is the AF system perfect and infallible - no, there were just a couple of instance where I had to override the focus to get it to lock onto a bird but that was very few and far between. But compared to my EM1-X and EM1 III, it's on a totally different level.
Is it as good as the best of the rest (i.e. Sony A1, A9 II, Nikon Z9 or Canon R6) ? I honestly don't know as I've never used them, but if they are appreciably better they must be perfect AF systems as the OM-1 has set the bar very high indeed (and not just in the micro four thirds world). It will be interesting to see them tested with the OM-1 in any future reviews. Also, when locking onto a subject the AF is pretty much instant and snaps to the subject in a micro second. I didn't get the opportunity to fully check it for BIF, other than a couple of magpies, but what I did try it picked them up and tracked them perfectly, but obviously with smaller quicker birds it remains to be seen.
Handling overall is very good to excellent, but I do like my battery grips (or EM1-X) when shooting with longer lenses, so can't wait for my HLD10 battery grip to arrive.
Battery life (so far) is astounding. As I said I took nearly 500 shots, as well as lots of chimping and messing with settings etc in my hours play, and the battery dropped from 100% down to only 91% (and again, that's on first full charge of the battery)! Now I have to caveat that by saying at least 60% of them were shot in high drive modes (10 or 25fps) and so that definitely helps, but even so !
Any finally an anomaly. The patch where I shoot mainly at the nature reserve is in a public wooden hide overlooking an opening in the dense trees that see's no direct sunlight. I've shot here for 20 years or more with all my cameras and noticed something interesting. When I shot with my EM1-X today because the area is relatively dark with no sunlight and the weather was overcast cloud, my ISO's were typically in the 3200-4000 range (its capped at ISO4000 on my EM1-X). However when I switched to the OM-1 and shot very similar scenes towards the same tress and feeders etc. from exactly the same spot, by ISO's were typically only 800-1600 on the OM-1. When I compared images and histograms on the back of the cameras they both looked very similar, same aperture and shutter speeds etc, but the ISO's on the OM1 were consistently between 1-1½ stops lower ? Not sure what's going on here, and obviously that's not a very scientific test so more to follow.
Again, that's it for now. I'll process some of the images I shot today later on tonight and see how they look on a computer monitor.
