I was cleaning out an old card the other day and found some images taken on the EM1x. The lens was a 45mm f1.8 wide open.
Happily processing the files, with no real application in mind, but they were of the dogs, who have been neglected a bit lately, I happened to notice the meta data. ISO 3200.
They are clean, bright, saturated and delicate.
Delicate, unlike Daisy’s treatment of her long suffering sister.
Nothing to obviouslty alert me they were in the upper end of the usable ISO range.
Clean and sharp, even in close.
Just a Captue 1 import, a little post and still with ON1 up my sleeve. I have a rule these days, that no RAW file should take more than half a minute to get right unless I am working towards fine art level images or it needs special treatment like ON1, then I will stretch to a minute.
Maybe boring to users of full frame cameras, but a nice reminder how far I have come with MFT and with the OM-1 avaialble, how much further I could go.
If the only hurdle that MFT genuinely has to beat is noise in comparison to larger sensor cameras, then for all practical purposes, the format is nearly there. If the real benefits of the system, which mainly come down to lenses, are fully exploited, there are really no real world situations where it cannot produce at pro level, but the secret is in the lenses (as it is for most systems). The point where the real benefits of full frame sensors in low light conditions pull away are testably find-able, but from a user perspective, effectively irrelevant.
Nikon Z series are in a similar space, only reversed. The benefits they have with a wider mouthed full frame mount mean that yuu can have an f4 kit lens, with effective depth of field of a full frame f2.8 lens, so where their format works against you DOF-wise for exposure (less depth at each stop so more exposure needed for the same depth), it allows you to buy their excellent kit glass for pro looking results.
So, MFT ca give you f2.8 full frame DOF while using f1.8 light gathering and Nikon Z can give you f2.8 looking DOF at f4. Two paths, same result.
Conversely, a Z series with their f0.95 lens or MFT at f16 produce extreme results at the other end of the spectrum.
Pick yuor poison or play it safe with Sony or Canon etc.