Micro Four Thirds, and YouTube “experts”
I’m conflicted between my distaste for excessive consumption and still rooting for OM System and the Micro Four Thirds image sensor system to do well; and sell as many cameras and lenses as possible. This is because I believe in it so much for all levels and genres of photography. And because all of the bullshit YouTube “experts” have polluted the entire photography community with nonsense about Full Frame sensors being the only ones worthy of use in 2024.
These are people who don’t know what they’re talking about, and wouldn’t be published in a photography magazine or serious online journalistic outlet in the past or present. Obviously, YouTube and other social media services are incredibly useful and invaluable for people who had almost no platform in traditional media. Left wing political outlets in particular have benefitted no end, which is great. Because in that instance, they are the experts. But there is of course a downside to allowing anyone to end up with huge platform. You can end up with non-experts reaching and influencing a far wider audience than the real experts in the field. And that is the case in photography. No matter what good people like Chris Niccols, Jordan Drake, Robin Wong, and many others say, there is seemingly an army of idiots out there to spread misinformation that seriously threatens a format like Micro Four Thirds. All the people I see who support MFT are thoughtful, intelligent, reasonable people. That’s a problem, because we live in a very dumb, unreasonable, reactionary society. It doesn’t really fit. It’s like left wing politics right now. People who have taken the time to really educate themselves politically can see through the nonsense liberals and conservatives spew incessantly; and can understand and appreciate the counterintuitive benefits of left wing policy ideas. The same goes for MFT cameras. The problem is that very few people actually do take the time to properly educate themselves on anything these days.
I’ve heard people in big companies say things like “the people are demanding this, so we’re just going to give it to them”. Even when they themselves know that it’s the wrong thing to do; they do it anyway because they know it’s harder to educate those people that what they really need is something counterintuitive. Take megapixels. We even saw with the Panasonic G9II (another MFT camera), where PetaPixel compared it to the OM System OM-1, and the G9 had worse image quality in their test despite having a 25mp sensor as opposed to 20mp. OM System worked hard to improve the sensor technology in other ways. To improve the overall image quality, rather than just resolution. But more people would just focus on the higher number and assume it’s better. And that’s within the Micro Four Thirds ecosystem.
This is why OM System is particularly at risk from this current online climate of idiocy (along with any other businesses that try to do things the right way in other fields). Panasonic are obviously a huge corporation, and they’ve also hedged their bets and have pushed full frame offerings a lot in recent years. OM is small, and only makes MFT cameras (apart from their tough series compact). And on top of that, they don’t subscribe to this idea of giving people what they want even if it means sacrifices to the end product. We’ve just seen this whole thing again recently with the updated OM-1. It came out a bit too soon for my liking (that’s another blog); but it did have a lot of significant improvements. Many of which couldn’t be done purely with a firmware update. Some of them could, and they are now working on an update to the original OM-1, the camera I have (and plan to keep using for the foreseeable future).
Obviously, there’s some controversy about whether or not they had abandoned that camera until pressure mounted on them. That’s another potential future blog topic. But the point is that the updated model does feature significant improvements that many professional photographers especially will really notice and appreciate. And that will make arguably as big of an impact or bigger on their photography than if the company had announced the OM-1 Mark II had doubled the sensor megapixels to 40, or some insane change that would be visible on the spec sheet. Imagine if they had done something like that. It would have been the talk of the town (at least until the full frame supremacists had made another unwelcome intervention). As it was, the conversation became almost exclusively negative, accusing OM of cashing in on their loyal customers and failing to innovate. Only true experts like Thomas Eisel (professional fashion photographer and YouTuber) actually went deep into all of the small but very significant improvements that were almost universally ignored elsewhere.
Thank god a big outlet like PetaPixel does give MFT fair coverage, and does their best to promote its advantages (lens size and weight, image stabilisation, computational modes, comparatively low cost, long telephoto range ideal for wildlife and particularly birds, and so on). Not to mention the fact that most people in the world can’t tell the fucking difference between full frame and MFT photos anyway. I just hope we don’t end up in a situation where MFT goes away.
Photography is like politics. You have the uneducated people who believe everything a grifter on YouTube tells them. And you have those who take the initiative and make the small effort required to get informed of the facts, and what they mean. For the left to win, and for us to eventually reduce consumption and stop releasing so many damn new camera models, (and other even more throwaway tech products); people have to be informed. And they have to buy Micro Four Thirds cameras. Strange way to end a blog maybe, but I think it works. I haven’t written for ages so you’ll just have to put up with it.
Originally published at http://christill.org on March 9, 2024.
