New camera book: OM-1II

I have once again made “Copy&Paste”…..

Seriously, it’s not my fault that the OM-1II is so strange. It’s an OM-1 with a few nice things built in, a few other nice things forgotten, a completely new AF logic and which is claimed to be the best of all cameras.

I don’t claim my book to be the best of all books. It is an update of the OM-1 book. No more, but also no less. I haven’t even really taken many photos with the OM-1II. One of the reasons for this was that OMDS refused to provide me with a camera, so a super nice person from the community bought one and sent it to me. Of course, I can’t now shoot two months in a row and send it back with 10,000 pictures on the counter. (It’s bad enough that the HDMI port couldn’t even cope with filming the menu for an hour – it’s already started acting up. My E-M5II back then had the same after a hundred hours of FolyFos and video capturing. The nice man now has to send the camera to Portugal for a cure).

But the time was enough for me to get a feel for the AF. As usual, after the first catastrophic results I wrote to OMDS asking if they could tell me how to get the AF to work, as I felt like the last fool – no, they didn’t know any tricks either.

Since the influencers regularly wrote rubbish in the articles praising the AF of the OM-1II – we had a few examples here – I suspect that the praise may also have been slightly exaggerated.

What I was told, that the promoters spread the story that you can now finally take sharp portraits with the camera, which would not have been possible with the previous cameras, I’ll tick off under “imaginative factsheet”. Yes, you can take sharp portraits with the camera. Just like with pretty much all previous cameras. I was even able to do this in analogue times without autofocus. Coooool. You can also take sharp pictures of flying birds with it. And of sitting birds. And snowboarders. And even – awesome – of castles and pub landlords. By the way – surprise – just like with all the cameras of the last twenty years.

However, if I have to shoot a wedding or a football match or a band, then I prefer to take the old OM-1. I know that it will deliver with all my lenses. Or my E-M1II, which also delivers. Or the E-M1X.

Now there are a lot of pictures in the book that were taken with the OM-1. Can they also be taken with the OM-1II? Yes – if you’re unlucky, with a little more waste, but in principle anything goes.

I assume that they will release a firmware update in the foreseeable future. And they already have to put up with the question in Tokyo as to why they only ever have their cameras tested by paid yes-men and never let anyone test them who tells them in good time that they have booked onto the Titanic.

And as usual, there will then be an update of the book. And unlike OMDS’s new plans, I deliver my updates free of charge. Even to influencers who claim in forums that updates are a completely exaggerated expectation.

A little note for my English-speaking readers: This book is only available in German.