Olympus E-M1 beats Canon 70D in DxOmark sensor test

The new Olympus OM-D E-M1 (that's a bit of a mouthful) has been DxO marked and scores higher than the new Canon EOS 70D. It should be noted that the Olympus is a Mirrorless camera and the Canon is a DSLR camera.

OM-D E-M1 scores higher than Canon 70D

For those who are not familiar with DxOmark, they represent the benchmark for camera sensor testing/analysis.

The image shown above is not an accurate representation of the size of these cameras. Here's a true size comparison from Camerasize.com.

Side by side size comparison

The purpose of comparing these two cameras is that they both employ sensor technology that performs phase detection autofocus off of the sensor. I was interested to know if there's any loss in image quality using these new sensors owing to the space occupied by their AF pixels or in Canon's case their split pixels. Olympus and Canon use a different system for off sensor phase detection autofocus but I won't go into the details here as there's plenty of information about these technologies on the web.

Performance improvements 

For Olympus, this new technology improves autofocus tracking when following moving subjects and allows their DSLR lenses to perform as well on the E-M1 as they do on the Olympus E-5 DSLR camera. Canon's implementation (Dual Pixel AF) allows faster and more accurate autofocus when using the live view screen and offers a general improvement in AF accuracy.

What I find interesting is that the Olympus camera is mimicking what a DSLR does well and the Canon camera is mimicking what a mirrorless camera does well.

Sensor performance rating

The overall scores are close, 73 for the Olympus and 68 for the Canon, but the Olympus shows a significant gain over the Canon on the Landscape (dynamic range) score equating to just over 1 Ev, giving more headroom for exposure adjustment of Raw files.  This is a good result.

DxOmark only tests the Raw sensor performance and not the overall performance of the camera.  However, the breakdown of the metrics provided by DxOmark can be very useful to learn how the sensor will perform for your type of photography.

Both these cameras are very good photographic tools but I would imagine that Canon users will be disappointed by the overall score of 68 for 70D considering it has a larger sensor than the Olympus.

Well done Olympus.