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There are many good reasons of why someone would want to use their old camera, either they already have it, or they realized that old cameras from 10 years ago would still give them a much better images than the current flagship phones today. Fortunately, now is the best time than ever to buy a used camera if anyone is interested. For example, OM-D E-M5 Mk2 is selling used at around $400, less than half the price of most flagship phones, then paring with a good prime lens like a used M.Zuiko Digital 25mm F1.8 for another $200, that would be a very powerful tool for street, food, lifestyle, etc. photography.
With all that said, in terms of image quality, old cameras have 2 issues in common that would make you want to buy a new, latest camera, AKA GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome). The issues with old cameras are their speed and dynamic range. Old cameras usually have low speed autofocus, and a low accuracy one at that. Not only that, their dynamic range is not very good. For example, according to DxO values, the first E-M1 that was released in 2013 has only around 12.7 stop of dynamic range, while the latest OM-1 Mk2 has around 13.6 stop of dynamic range.
Other than that, they could be hard to repair due to the lack of spare parts. Unless you want an expensive paperweight at home, and depending on your location, you may have to import parts to fix your camera. Therefore, it's a good idea to prolong your camera life when it's old.
Since I have the first E-M1 with me, I will write about how I get the most out of it. Nonetheless, this guide will definitely be applicable to other old camera models as well.
There are 2 useful improvements in this regard: autofocus speed and operation speed.
The autofocus speed and the accuracy can be improved easily and dramatically by using the touch screen to focus and shoot on my E-M1 camera. This is a one tap operation that eliminates the dependence of in-camera's face detection and the need of slowly moving the focus cursor to the focus point. The rest will be depended on your lens' focus speed. For example, all Olympus/OM System lenses generally have fast autofocus speed, especially the pro line. While some Lumix lenses can be slow to focus, the popular Lumix 20mm F1.7, for example. Therefore, make sure to pair your camera with the right lens.
For the operation speed. Let's say by default, after you take a shot, there's around 0.5 second preview probably in any camera. To further improve the speed, we can turn off the preview time completely. There will be no delay between shots. This way, I can rapidly tap tap tap the touch screen to focus and shot quickly. But why not using burst/sequential shot feature instead? Believe me, you wouldn't want to use burst shots with the unreliable tracking autofocus system in your old cameras anyway.
One thing that everyone already know about improving the dynamic range out of any camera is to shoot in RAW. But shooting in RAW will require a little bit of post-processing to get out the final image that can be open/use in other applications. For example, VSCO on Android and on the web don't support RAW files currently. Not to mention that, to develop RAW files, you will need a specific software and a fast PC too. I personally use Darktable when I have to develop RAW.
But do I always shoot RAW? No.
Depending on your purpose, there's noting wrong with shooting JPEG on your camera. For example, if my goal is to have a film look for my shot, I wouldn't shoot RAW, as many details in the shadow and highlight areas along with many colors will be lost/discard anyway. Therefore, shooting RAW in this scenario will only cost me more time, negligible difference in the final image at best.
Moreover, shooting in RAW won't fix photographer's mistakes. For example, you can't fix under or over exposure shot by shooting RAW. Shooting JPEG with the correct exposure will always give you a better result, since you can't fix shutter speed nor ISO just by shooting RAW. And you can't definitely fix your missed focus, regardless of RAW or JPEG.
Now, let's talk about shooting JPEG. In-camera JPEG engine already fixed many bad things for us automatically, e.g. adaptive lens sharpening, diffraction compensation, lens flaws correction (distortion, chromatic aberration), shading compensation (vignetting), moiré pattern issue, etc. And these fixes were implemented since TruePic VII era with the introduction of E-M1 for more than 10 years ago. In other word, your camera's JPEG engine might be more powerful than you think!
With that said, since dynamic range is so important in terms of image quality, can we do more than just shoot RAW that isn't suitable for every situation?
Yes, we can.
My secret source is the auto gradation feature in my E-M1 camera. Basically, the camera will try to make adjustment on shadow to preserve the most details out of the shadow while not affecting the highlight. It's an in-camera hack, so you don't have to pull anything out of the shadow in RAW manually. It's the most useful feature IMO.
Maintenance of an old camera can be a bit expensive, just like old cars.
I can say that most cameras don't break, but if they happen to break, it usually happens to the moving parts of your camera. Guess what, every time you take a photo, there's something moving really fast. It's the camera's mechanical shutter! The expectancy lifespan of the mechanical shutter typically ranges from 100,000 to 400,000 shots. I have seen many people's shutters died at around 20,000 shots in early Olympus models. My E-M1's shutter died once at around 100,000 shots.
That's why I always use electronic shutter (silence mode) whenever it's possible.
However, using the electronic shutter has some downsides, especially with bigger sensors that usually have slower readout than smaller sensors. The said downsides are mainly the jelly effect when shooting a fast moving object and the flickered banding in some lighting conditions, mostly with indoor light. You can easily fix/avoid the latter with auto flicker reduction. You can also set the value to match the lighting frequency if the auto value doesn't work. This feature is on my E-M1, so it's probably available to most cameras in the past 10 years or so.
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I hope this article is useful. Thanks for reading.
