EM-5 : Focus Adapted Lenses and Magnify Live View

Hi Lou,

There's no way for the camera to provide focus confirmation with those lenses, so it's all manual. Good news is that the manual focus aids on the E-M5 are pretty good.

You can use magnified view with both viewfinder and rear touchscreen.

Using the touch screen, tap the area of interest to bring up the focus box. The slider on the right adjusts the size of the box and also the level of magnification from 5x to 14x. Tapping the magnify button bottom right toggles between magnified and full views.

Using the viewfinder, make sure you have mapped either Fn1 or Fn2 to "Magnify" in the menu (Custom Menu B). Or, if Fn2 is set to Multi-Function, make sure you switch to the magnify function. Then, press the function button to bring up the focus box and press it again to magnify. You can move the green box around in either view with the directional buttons. And when magnified, you can change the magnification between 5x and 14x using the rear dial.

Hope this helps.

 

Back button focus? More good news, then. Check out this link: http://thrumikesviewfinder.blogspot.com/2013/09/back-button-focusing-with-om-d-e-m5.html?m=1

 

 

Since it was not mentioned yet, I think I might let you know there is one other focus aid for using Legacy glass or manual only lenses. The newer E-M1 has something called focus peaking. Whats that you might ask? Well , "Focus peaking is the name for an electronic display technology, which highlights the areas of sharpest focus in an image with a false-color halo or sort of shimmering." Now the E-M5's current firmware does not have this setting, but there is a Focus peaking type procedure you can use. It involves using one of the art filter settings to shot with and setting the camera to record both Raw & Jpeg files, so you can get the image you want with raw processing later. While it is not proper focus peaking, it still works the same way. There is someone who created a whole thread about it and there are even how to videos on you-tube detailing how to do it. I hope someone chimes in with the link because I cant recall it currently.

 

https://www.mu-43.com/showthread.php?t=35442