The camera has good reviews can anyone think of a good reason why I shouldn't order it?
Yeah it's an Olympus!
Seriously.
Two makes of DSLR's I wouldnt touch are Olympus and Pentax for one reason. You try buying lenses for them!
The Olympus uses the Four Thirds lens mount which Olympus really hoped would make everyone in the photographic world go "ahh, what a great idea, you know what we should all do that". Instead everyone in the photographic world went "ahh, what a crap idea, there's no way we are adopting it as well". The result is that if you buy an Olympus you are stuck with just the Olympus range of lenses which is small and not everyone sells them. Buy a Nikon or Canon (or even a Fuji which also use the Nikon mount) and you can buy Nikon, Canon, Sigma and Tamrom lenses which basically gives you a choice of hundreds and they are sold everywhere.
What is Four Thirds? Okay most DSLR's use a sensor that is smaller than a 35mm frame this means that any lens gives a field of view 1.5x or 1.6x larger than the same lens on a 35mm camera due to the fact the edges of the frame are cut off on the sensor what Olympus did was to make their sensor even smaller which means lenses would have an even higher crop effect! When Olympus came up with the four thirds system it was at a time when people were complaining that there werent many wide angle lenses for a DSLR due to the crop factor so a camera that just made this situation even worse wasnt exactly attractive. However all the lens companies then went out and built wider lenses that were suitable only for digital SLR's and everyone was happy....except Olympus who couldnt or wouldnt get any third party company to build four third lenses. Then Canon came out and said, okay we'll build a digital SLR that uses a sensor the same size as a 35mm frame (a full frame sensor) and everyone went "ooh, ahh"....except Olympus who went "ahh sh1t".
Basically the four thirds system although good on paper is dead in the water because everyone else is either happy sticking with 1.5x (Nikon) or 1.6x (Canon) crop cameras or are going the other way and looking towards Full Frame cameras. Only Olympus has decided to go the other way which is a really stupid thing to do because apart from the fact that no third party manufacturer like Sigma and Tamrom will make lenses for your cameras it also means that Olympus cameras are noisier (image noise like film grain) than any other DSLR for the simple reason that the smaller the sensor the more tightly you have to pack the pixels and the smaller the pixels are, both of which require more current to amplify the signal from them and current is the biggers contributer to noise.
Buy any camera other than an Olympus!
