Leaked Images of Olympus E-M1 and the New 12-40mm f/2.8 Lens

Here is the new 12-40mm f/2.8 PRO MFT lens from Olympus! And it looks great on the new E-M1.  The images have been leaked (and now removed) in Japan (at “2ch“). Camera and Lens will be announced around September 10-11.

The price of the new lens but this marvelous looking lens supposedly outperforms Panasonic 12-35mm X lens in terms of IQ and autofocus which really means a lot.

Improved AF – this is an assumption. Olympus always improves their AF capability of their new flagship model so I assume it has been further improved. Not that E-M5 is slow by any means but hopefully C-AF is now actually usable.

Better IQ – this has been claimed by Olympus already but by how much? This time around, I don’t expect the kind of jump Olympus achieved when they released the E-M5. An incremental IQ improvements over the E-M5 would be fine here. According to the translation, the E-M1 will be 1-stop better in ISO performance than the E-M5 which is pretty good but not 2+ stop improvements achieved by the E-M5.

Also, the article doesn’t say if this applies only to the JPEGs or also for the RAWs. If it is only for the JPEGs, then it could be achieved with the same sensor but with better processing. So we will need to wait and see which is the case here. Either way, we are looking at noise-free ISO4800 JPEG images.

Bigger EVF is a significant advantage. Once again, E-M5′s EVF was actually nice to use. But the new EVF in the E-M1 is far better. I’m really looking forward in seeing it in person. Focus peaking will be easier to use with this EVF. You can peek at the future by looking through the VF-4.

It appears that there’s more manual control wheels and buttons. As long as the body doesn’t get much bigger, more controls are welcome! They are larger as well.

There’s the bigger grip. Although I didn’t find the E-M1 grip particularly bad, it was harder to hold it when I was using a larger lens such as the olympus 75-300mm. The new grip will fix this problem nicely and so will for anyone with larger hands.

1/8000s shutter speed will prove to be useful.

WiFi/NFC with remote control using smartphones – being a geek, I’m looking forward in trying this feature out.

Better IBIS although I’m very happy with the performance of E-M5′s IBIS.

E-M1 will feature a full HDR mode, whatever that means. Hopefully it will be better implemented than E-M5′s which is next to useless. Apparently, an electronic shutter is used so you don’t feel multiple shots being triggered. This feature could be a nice surprise.

The big question remaining is, whether E-M1′s PDAF works well with native M43 lenses hence providing better C-AF performance. According to the source, it does. Does this mean we finally have a well performing mirrorless camera with C-AF? My previous understanding with the M43 lenses is that they were optimized for CDAF so I wasn’t expecting much when it came down to C-AF using hybrid PDAF sensors.