No Sensor Dust on Olympus OM-D Cameras! I'm Amazed!

Cattle Skulls, Santa Fe, New Mexico (click to enlarge)

I first bought an Olympus OM-D E-M5 in May of 2012.  I really enjoyed that camera but I had a few minor complaints with some of the controls and menu items.  Nothing major.  The image quality was excellent. When the E-M1 was introduced, I purchased one of those in December 2013 as it seemed Olympus fixed the few things that bothered me about the E-M5.  Over the past two years, I never realized there was no sensor dust to be cleaned until it hit me recently.

I was talking with a photographer friend the other day and we were discussing cleaning sensors.  It was then I realized that in the over 2 years of use, cross-country trips, numerous photography outings in the outdoors, neither camera showed any dust on the sensor!  That is amazing to me!  How could that be?

I've had to clean my Nikon cameras many times over and dust seems to easily stick to the sensor.  I've even had to use some additional pressure to get some of the really sticky dust off.  But not with the Olympus cameras.  No dust–and I check often using the dust spotting feature available in Lightroom 5.

Additionally, the Nikon has a mirror in front of the sensor assembly where the Olympus' sensor assembly is directly exposed to the outside when the lens is off.

My photography has not changed.  Both manufacturers' cameras are exposed to the same conditions.  I change lenses frequently with both.  I don't handle them differently.  I do, however, try to adhere to the best practices when changing lenses outdoors with both cameras; camera turned off, opening down and done quickly.  I have to deduce that the built-in sensor cleaning system in the Olympus cameras is far superior to the one built into the Nikon cameras.  Or, it might be a difference of some sort in the electronics and digital SLR versus mirrorless.  I really don't know.

Again, I don't know why and I haven't seen or read anything about this topic on the Internet, but I like the fact that dust doesn't seem to be a problem on the Olympus cameras.  Chalk another plus up for Olympus and M4/3 format!


Thanks for looking.

Dennis Mook

Many of my images can be found at www.dennismook.com.  Please pay it a visit.  I add new images regularly.  Thank you.


All content on this blog is © 2014 Dennis A. Mook.  All Rights Reserved.  Feel free to point to this blog from your website with full attribution.  Permission may be granted for commercial use.  Please contact Mr. Mook to discuss permission to reproduce the blog posts and/or image.