Photokina 2016: Hands-on with Olympus OM-D E-M1 II

Olympus used this year's Photokina tradeshow as a platform to announce the development of a new flagship camera - the OM-D E-M1 II. And we just got our hands on it. Click through this slideshow for a tour of the camera's key new features.

The E-M1 II is very well-built. We expected nothing less from the successor to the original E-M1, and it's obvious that the new camera is made to withstand shooting in tough conditions.

As well as flagship build quality, the E-M1 II also features the now-traditional plethora of buttons, dials and switches that Olympus adds to all of its high-end cameras.

Resembling a small DSLR, the E-M1 features a high-resolution electronic viewfinder which offers a live view feed at a rate of 120fps. The reaction time is a mere 6 milliseconds. The low, mixed lighting of a Photokina meeting room was not ideal to really assess the quality of the finder in normal use, but it certainly seems sharp and clear.  

One of the paradoxes of high-end Micro-Four Thirds cameras has been their size. They're small compared to most DSLRs, but much bigger than you might expect from the size of their sensors. The E-M1 II is a pretty bulky camera compared to some of Olympus's lower-end M43 offerings, but it is more comfortable to hold, and that bulky handgrip feels great. 

New in the E-M1 II is a fully articulating rear LCD screen (the E-M1's screen was a simpler tilting design). Olympus tells us that this kind of articulation is more popular with videographers, which makes sense.

The E-M1 II offers a very impressive 4K video specification, boasting up to 236mbps data throughput. From our brief use, the revamped image stabilization system provides uncannily stable video footage, too. 

Twin SD card slots allow for multiple configurations, including overflow (where one card simply acts as a spare) backup, and mixed-media recording. On shoots which involve both video and stills capture we suspect that a lot of photographers will record video to one card and stills to the other. The E-M1 II supports the latest UHS-II SD format.