I’m going to Spain for a month next January and although I have a great OM1 Mkii and a few lenses for it, I would rather take a lighter, smaller camera with just on or maybe two lenses to more easily carry around. I need to use a power chair for longer walk about.
My online research has thrown up a few candidates but there is no substitute for real life experience so thought I would ask this forum for recommendations. My budget would be around £1,500. I would be looking to take general travel shots, not so much landscape or portraiture, however.
Any suggestions, very gratefully received.
There are so many options here, which depend on what you mean by smaller and lighter, and how wedded you are to using particular focal lengths.
One camera (your existing Olympus) plus your existing 12-100, would seem the obvious and most versatile reduction in bulk and weight compared to your full outfit.
Still with the 12-100, you could replace the OM1 with an EM5, to further reduce weight and bulk, while still taking a high quality, versatile single lens.
There also the 14-150 Olympus zoom, which is much lighter and smaller than the 12-100, but nowhere near as good quality.
When I wanted a minimal outfit, and as I like primes, I used an Olympus EM1.3 or an EM5 body with just the 17mm f1.8 Olympus lens. For general photography, I am happy enough with just a 35mm equivalent prime.
I also used the Olympus 14-150 or the Olympus 12-200 lenses on one of my Olympus bodies when I wanted something more versatile and I was less interested in image quality. I am interested in wildlife, and the longer zoom is really useful for grabbing insect pictures to help with later identification.
For a period, my "small, lightweight" kit was an EM5 with the 17mm plus the 14-150 or 12-200.
Before buying into Olympus, I was a long-term Fuji and Nikon user (50+ years for Nikon), and the above was in addition to those outfits. Ater a few years, I got rid of the Olympus kit and my current lightweight kit is a Fuji X100s (with 28mm adapter) plus a Nikon z50II with the 24-200mm Nikon zoom, but I also had the Nikon 50-250 at one time.
As an aside, the Nikon 24-200 is actually slightly smaller and lighter than the Olympus 12-100, while giving the same zoom range on a larger sensor, which helps compensate for the poorer image quality of the Nikon lens.
I'm not suggesting you should buy a Nikon, just explaining what I ended up doing. My first option would be to try and work something out around your current kit. Which, of course, isn't what I actually did, because I went down the road of adding an m43 outfit (Panasonic and Olympus) as my lightweight outfit, which in my case turned out to be a waste of time and money.
As I'm unhappy about not having a backup camera, I would always prefer a two-camera solution with a zoom that covers a standard lens focal length option, but, If pushed to only take one camera (ignoring my wildlife interests) I would probably go for a Fuji X100VI with the 28mm adapter. The 40mp sensor on the X100VI gives a bit of flexibility for cropping, and the 28mm adapter is small and high quality.
Actually OM5ii for me, but very similar.
