Hand Held high res mode on left.
Hand Held high res mode on top.
Since the Olympus E-M1X hand held high res mode shoots a normal size raw file (20MP) at the same time as the larger 8 image stacked file (50MP) it's possible to see the difference. I tried this yesterday on two subjects, a fountain and a fast flowing river. As you can see you get a smoothing of the water similar to using a slow shutter speed, but also a few artefacts. However, as far as I'm concerned this is not unpleasant and perfectly usable. Here's a further selection.
The last three above were taken with a fast flowing river and the results were excellent. Below I've blown up the bottom left hand corner of the last image with the people in the picture.
As you can see a 'ghost' like image has appeared, not unlike when a tripod and slow shutter is used. This can obviously be cloned out, but this is what you get.
CONCLUSION
I've spent a lot of time on this as I shoot a lot of images with moving water in them. I'm pleased to report that in most cases this doesn't cause problems and in fact can look good with the water looking smoothed out. Now this isn't, obviously, going to be of any use whatsoever for those that shoot fast action images, sports pictures etc. I also imagine street photography could throw up a few strange looking results. But if like me you shoot a lot of landscape and architecture the 50MP hand held hi-res mode is a useful way of producing a larger image. In practice it's worth doing because the camera produces a 20MP no stacked image at the same time. Somewhat oddly it's an .ORI file. However by simply changing the file by writing in .DNG the files open up as raw in Photoshop.
