Both Olympus E-PL5 and Sony A37 have 16.0 MP resolution sensors but Olympus E-PL5's sensor is Four Thirds (17.3 x 13 mm ) and Sony A37's sensor is APS-C (23.5 x 15.6 mm ).
Since Sony A37's has a larger sensor area with the same resolution, this means that it also has a larger pixel area hence better light collecting capacity for a given aperture compared to Olympus E-PL5.
Below you can see the E-PL5 and A37 sensor size comparison.
As seen above, Sony A37 has a 1.6x Larger sensor area than Olympus E-PL5. Larger sensors give photographer more control on the depth of field and blurry background compared to smaller sensor when shot in same focal length and aperture.
DxOMark Sensor Scores
DxOMark is a benchmark that scientifically assesses image quality of camera sensors. It scores camera sensors for color depth (DXO Portrait), dynamic range (DXO Landscape) and low-light sensitivity (DXO Sports), and also gives them an overall score. Olympus E-PL5 and Sony A37 sensors have been tested by DxO and the results show that A37 has a better overall score of 75, 3 points higher compared to E-PL5's score of 72.
Model |
Overall |
Color Depth |
Dynamic Range |
Low-light ISO |
Olympus E-PL5 |
72 |
22.8 bits |
12.3 Evs |
889 ISO |
Sony A37 |
75 |
23.3 bits |
12.9 Evs |
799 ISO |