Today, OM-System announced their new vintage aesthetic mirrorless camera, the OM-3. This is a relatively high-end Micro 4/3 camera with a design style meant to mimic the Olympus OM-1 from the 1970s, and aesthetically, it absolutely works. The camera is beautiful, with a solid metal body with wonderfully knurled dials and that classic looking viewfinder prism hump.
However, looking at what OM-System put into this camera, and where they are pricing it has left me very confused. The camera looks to be a very good camera overall, with a high-speed stacked sensor, very good autofocus, extremely high electronic shutter burst rates, excellent in-body image stabilization and those wonderful computational photography features that Olympus and later OM-System have been known for. But then there are the down sides, and those come down to some major design decisions that work against what I think the target use for this camera is.
Who is this camera for?
When you first look at the spec sheet of the OM-3, a few things might stand out to you. Some are very positive. Some are quite negative. And given the design of the camera, the juxtaposition of these items lead me to scratch my head. First, the sensor used is a 20 megapixel stacked CMOS sensor: the same one used in the OM-1 Mark II. This is, on the face of things, great. You get a highly performant sensor that can do very fast readout, crazy burst rates (though only a 90 shot buffer in RAW with a slow clear, making a 50fps burst a bit of a one and done scenario), etc. The problem is, this sensor is expensive, and it’s the primary driver behind the OM-3’s $1,999 price point.
The issue I have here is that this is a flat front retro-styled camera with no grip. This is not going to be the camera people reach for for heavy wildlife shooting and sports content. This is a camera designed for daily carry, street shooting and travel photography. Those target areas do NOT require a high-speed stacked sensor, and yet that’s where a huge portion of the budget has gone. It has performance parity in electronic shutter mode with the OM-1 Mark II, but anyone who NEEDS that performance will almost certainly be happier spending the extra $400 for the OM-1 Mark II. OM-System could have saved $500 and put in a more traditional CMOS sensor and the target market for this body would not miss anything.
Then you have the viewfinder. The OM-1 Mark II has a large (0.74x magnification) 5.76 million dot EVF. This camera? a 2.36 million dot EVF with 0.61x magnification. Well, it might be 0.61x. It also might be 0.68x….documentation seems to vary on that subject, but the impression I get is it is 0.61x in its standard mode, and 0.68x with an expanded view mode when the diopter is adjusted to -1.0 (so I guess hope you have that level of nearsightedness). In either case, just, why? This is a $2,000 camera in 2025, and it has a viewfinder that has the same resolution and yet is smaller in magnification than the EVF on the Olympus E-M5 Mark II released ten years ago. I just cannot even fathom WHY this decision was made. Why on earth would you not at least have a 0.7x 3.69 million dot EVF on this thing ?
Then, there’s the competition. Yes, the main draw to Micro 4/3 is the tiny size, and I get that, but for $2,000 or less, you can get the following cameras: The Fujifilm X-T5, the Nikon Zf, the Nikon Zfc, the Sony a6700, the Fujifilm X-T50 and the Fujifilm X100VI, among many others. The Nikon Zf is a full-frame body with exceptional image quality, a huge 0.8x magnification EVF, outstanding IBIS and a similarly outstanding retro design. It is much larger, though.
The Fujifilm cameras especially have to be seen as the biggest competition here outside of the Micro 4/3 space. All three of the ones I mentioned are cheaper, have a 40 megapixel APS-C sensor with better image quality, have beautiful retro-styled designs, and the small Fujicron primes allow for a very compact kit like Micro 4/3 as well. The X-T5 and X100VI also have better viewfinders. Interestingly enough, the X-T50, which does also have a smaller low res EVF like the OM-3, but with that better sensor and costing $600 less, is actually SMALLER than the OM-3 as well.
Yes, the OM-3’s sensor is stacked and higher performance….but as mentioned earlier, those capabilities are somewhat wasted in a body design such as this with a tiny low-res viewfinder.
So while the OM-3 is a beautiful camera with excellent performance, solid build and undoubtedly can produce very nice images: it just seems to really miss the mark with regards to design choices and price point. As such, I think it’s going to be a camera that appeals to die-hard Olympus/OM-System fans who want a retro body at any price. Beyond that, I’m just left confused.
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