Camera comparison: Olympus vs iPhone

Today I was out – I wanted to take a walk to compare the new iPhone SE (2nd gen, or 2020) with my Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mk2. The iPhone has a 4mm/1.8 lens which has an angle of view comparable to a 28mm lens on a film (or the so-called “full frame”) camera, so I mounted a comparable 14mm/2.5 Panasonic lens onto my Olympus cam.

Originally I just wanted to walk, but I was warned about the weather (thank you Shi), so I took the car and went to Mönchbruch first, and around the airport later. So here are some photos “out of camera” (without further processing) from both the Olympus and the iPhone:

_7262684
Olympus
img_0039
iPhone
_7262687
Olympus
img_0041
iPhone
_7262688
Olympus
img_0042
iPhone
_7262689
Olympus
img_0043
iPhone
_7262690
Olympus
img_0045
iPhone

So what do I see?

The Olympus photos straight from the camera with the standard or “normal” jpg profile are flatter, and leave more room for further enhancements – while these from the iPhone look heavily processed already, with a hint of HDR, contrast, colouring etc. already applied, and this may well be what most people (including me in some cases) would actually prefer. You can really take these and share them because they’re kind of “ready”, while these from my camera need some further work to make them look really good.

Awesome. Who would have thought that?

So yes, these are comparable which is a great result from a sensor only 1/3.5th the diagonal size of a Micro Four Thirds one (see the focal lengths of 4mm vs 14mm), and even with “only” 12 megapixels that iPhone isn’t really much worse than the 16 MP camera, at least in good light like here.

And like most modern mobile phones, there’s software built in to further “enhance” your photos to taste which means that you really don’t need any processing software or even a computer for “development” anymore. There are even three good looking black & white profiles, so see a last photo I took after returning home, and what you can do with it in camera:

img_0049
Tuna the cat, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020
standard iPhone profile
img_0049 2
Tuna the cat, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020
mono iPhone profile
img_0049 3
Tuna the cat, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020
silvertone iPhone profile
img_0049 4
Tuna the cat, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2020
noir iPhone profile

Cool. Understandable that for most people these cameras in modern mobile phones are all they’d ever need…

As always, thanks for viewing, and for reading. And thanks again to my friend Shi who saved me from a really heavy shower 🙂