As part of my ongoing evaluation of some Olympus Loaner Gear I went out yesterday to conduct an OM-D E-M1X battery life test. During other field tests I have been surprised with the battery life in the OM-D E-M1X. So, I decided it was time to spend some time doing a battery life test.

NOTE: Click on images to enlarge. I have included a few images from my OM-D E-M1X battery test to serve as visual breaks.

As we all know, battery life can vary quite a bit based on photographic style and content, weather conditions, and the use of a camera’s rear screen.

To put my OM-D E-M1X battery life test in context it is important to specify the type of photography I was doing and the weather conditions.

It was a fairly bright sunny day with the temperature in the 20 degree Celcius range (68 degrees Fahrenheit). I was photographing mainly swallows in flight using Sequential Low, i.e. 10 frames-per-second using the mechanical shutter. I used Continuous Auto-focus with a 5×5 AF pattern. My camera was set to Manual Mode with an auto-ISO setting.

I had the rear screen flipped around and visible so I could look at the back of the camera quickly. I checked my images periodically, but spent most of my time photographing the swallows.

I set the OM-D E-M1X for ‘quick sleep mode’. Given how fast I was photographing the swallows I don’t know how often the camera had the opportunity to actually go into this mode.

I had about 2 hours to do this test. My goal was to fill two 32 GB cards within that time frame. I was able to meet my objective and filled two 32 GB cards with a total of 2,710 images. I was shooting in RAW + jpeg.

At the conclusion of my OM-D E-M1X battery life test the camera was reporting 46% battery life remaining. On the surface this was very impressive… but this was the amount of battery life remaining on Battery 1 only. Battery 2 still had 100% charge!

Over the past several weeks I have routinely been able to capture well over 2,000 images on only 1 of the E-M1X’s 2 batteries. This was the first time I went out to actually measure battery life on the camera. My OM-D E-M1X battery life test confirmed that this camera has excellent battery life in typical, real world use.

For readers who have some experience photographing swallows in flight, you may find the subject distances noted in the EXIF data of interest. This speaks to the quick auto-focusing performance of the Olympus OM-D E-M1X. I did not use Subject Tracking.

Technical Note:
All photographs in this article were captured using camera gear as noted in the EXIF data. All of the photographs displayed in this article were produced from RAW files using my standard process.

Use of Olympus Loaner Equipment
All of the photographs in this article were captured using Olympus Loaner Gear which was supplied by Olympus Americas Inc. on a no-charge basis. We are under no obligation what-so-ever to Olympus Americas Inc. in terms of our use of this loaner Olympus camera equipment. There is no expectation or agreement of any kind with Olympus Americas Inc. that we will create and share with readers any images, articles or videos, or on what that content may be.

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