I had the OMD E-5 with the handgrip and was very satisfied for travel purposes using prime lenses. I just sold the E-5 and acquired the OMD E-1. I travel with a Tilley Vest and the Panasonic 20mm 1.7, Olympus 45mm 1.7, Olympus 12 mm F2, and the Panasonic 100-300 zoom. The primes fit in the vest with other accessories, but I tend to hang the zoom on my belt, when I carry same. I find this works exceptionally well and results from Prime lenses are very good indeed. It is my subjective impression that the images from the E-5 were sharper than the E-1. Also an unexpected problem is moire from the E-1 (anyone else encountered this???), so I have to shoot both raw and Jpeg files, as Oly processing eliminates moire in the jpeg files (or most of it).
Allan in BC
I've never used an e-5.
First I have to admit I used the em-5 a lot more than the em-1, but I'll know a lot more this week about the em-1.
I've used the em-5 for with studio flash and never seen moire which will usually show up with angled flash.
With sharpness, that's always hard to quantify. The em-5 and 1 are not as "sharp looking" as my medium format cameras, but much sharper than my canons and nikons in overall look.
The em-5 especially looks like film with pleseant grain. (everybody says that about noise if they like the camera) but in this case it's true.
I would ask what your processing in. Try lightroom, but also try iridient raw developer, or even olympus supplied software.
I read somewhere (don't know where) that the em-5 has a sony sensor, the em-1 a panasonic sensor but the em-1 (and I'm not a tech science type of person) is said to use a million of the 16million pixels for focusing so it is in a way a 15 mpx camera, though it has the same image size as any 16mpx camera. I don't know if that's true or not, though I really wished that the em-1 looked identical to the em-5.
Once again except for something like moire, all this how a file looks is very subjective, but if the jpegs are processing it out, obviously you can correct some or all of it in a software suite with more control.
Is it color or pattern moire. Color moire is easy, pattern moire is end of the world hard.
BTW: What are your settings. I may be wrong but I believe some of the raw settings are carried over to lightroom. Have you tried zero noise reduction, cutting saturation, putting sharpness below zero?
IMO
BC