The Operational Land Imager (OLI) aboard Landsat 8 measures in the visible, near infrared, and shortwave infrared portions of the spectrum. Its images cover wide areas of Earth's landscape while providing sufficient resolution to distinguish features like urban centers, farms, forests, and other land uses.

The OLI-2 aboard Landsat 9 is a copy of the OLI aboard Landsat 8, and provides visible and near infrared/shortwave infrared (VNIR/SWIR) imagery consistent with previous Landsat spectral, spatial, radiometric, and geometric qualities. A difference, however, is that Landsat 9 will downlink all 14 bits of data produced by OLI-2, providing a greater bit depth for its imagery as compared to the 12-bit data downlinked from Landsat 8’s OLI. An impact of this change is that OLI-2 will provide additional, useful information for dark targets like dense forests.

OLI data have been combined with ESA Sentinel-2 MSI data in the Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) dataset.