I see blogs by pro photographers who are trying out the EVIL cameras for walkaround/personal use, and say they LOVE the picture quality. Hmm, that’s a 4/3 sensor.
Secondly, the Olympus cameras are renowned for their fantastic looking jpegs. The raws can't be worse.
Then you come across portfolios by war photographers and social documentarians using compact cameras, and their images can be absolutely searing. These people are pro photographers and IMHO great artists.
The biggest problem Olympus has isn’t their sensor size, it’s buyer obsession with The Great Allrounder. If a camera has one thing that isn’t as good as every other camera, it gets bagged to death and pronounced unusable, or at the very least undesirable.
People who obsess about great allrounders probably don’t know what they want to photograph or how they are going to photograph it. Either that or they gigantically overestimate their own versatility. So they shop for a camera that covers all possibilities because they don’t have a clue what it will and won’t be used for, in fact it will probably be carried around everywhere while the owner ‘remains open to possibilities’.
Well that’ not Olympus’ fault, although they are paying the price commercially for being unique.
Olympus DSLR owners should be sneering right back over the fence at us. I always say camera bodies come and bodies go, but lenses are forever. Here are a few questions for Oly E5 owners to fire right back at FF owners (APS-C in brackets): Are you enjoying your 70-200mm (45-135mm) f2.0 super high quality zoom lens, 200mm long and 1600g? How about your 600mm (400mm) f2.8 super high quality with 3 ED elements, I don’t see that in your bag? Your 300mm (200mm) f2.0 must be left at home today, I presume? And your standard zoom 28-70mm (18-50mm), I guess the f2.0 mark has rubbed off the dial, right? Does it have 5 stops of IS? My 300mm (200mm) f2.0 has class leading performance, or it would if it wasn’t in a class of one!
My tip for Oly DSLR owners: hang in there, you've got us all beat for lenses, and you're smart enough to shoot at low ISO at which your images lack for nothing, and just one more generation of sensor and you'll be shooting at higher ISO (if you really
must), while all the other brands' lenses are showing no sign of catching up, ever.