A previous Youtube test video of the E-M1x shows that the intelligent bird detection process runs a separate pattern recognition algorithm only on the Truepic processors to identify the bird. The pattern recognition algorithm identifies which focus points to use and then passes them to the phase detection focusing system to obtain physical focus. That might explain why you can get a perfect green box around the bird, but the image below can often be out of focus.
I also found that intelligent bird detection works with both the 5 x 5 grid and the all-point grid. If you start with a 5 x 5 grid, the bird detection box operates outside of that grid and identifies a bird anywhere on the screen. This is explained when bird detection is actually a separate process from bird focus. A further Youtube video from Andre Boss showed that the 5x5 grid leads to better focus accuracy. So this is definitely one to try. Has anyone else experience with it?
I will cover this in more depth in this new post and I have also published a fairly comprehensive article on Sony / Oly noise comparison on the website.
David.