GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

Hey, Panasonic, take a look over here. This is how you upgrade a successful, well designed camera. You add almost no changes, boosting the maximum ISO from 3200 to 6400, for example, and perhaps tweaking the color and shaving some weight to make it look a little different from its predecessor. What you don’t do is take possibly the best camera you ever made (GF1) and dumb it down until it is little more than a point-and-shoot with interchangeable lenses (GF2).

Olympus did it right, and the paragraph above contains almost all the tweaks it made to the already good Pen EPL-1. In fact, the new camera does’t even get a new name, just an extra letter: EPL-1s.

A bigger change is the new kit lens, the 4-42mm II 3.5-5.6 which shrinks down to 454g (one pound) and gets a video-friendly silent AF motor which is also faster to focus than the old model.

The EPL-1s can also be had in a nasty burgundy/red colorway.

The new kit is launching in Japan, hopefully making its way overseas soon.

Olympus Pen Lite [Olympus Japan]

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Rumors have been swirling around an imminent update to Panasonic’s GF-1 for the last week, but now we have a photograph of the Lumix GF-2. The word from the snitches and stool-pigeons on the street has been that the GF-2 will be tiny, and will keep the same sensor as the current GF-1.

As you can see, it is very small, with some reports claiming that it will be smaller than Sony’s NEX cameras, the current kings of the mirrorless slimming contest. This photograph was snapped by a French reader of the 43 Rumors site, outside the Salon de Photo show which opens in Paris tomorrow. This rings true: every year at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, ad billboards betray new products days before the show begins.

But you want more details, right? The GF-2 will sport a new image processor, record “Full-HD” and will come equipped with a touch-screen. Looking at the photo, it appears that the size reduction might come at the expense of utility: Apart from the shutter-release, there appear to be almost no controls on the top plate, and certainly no dials. I guess the touch screen will fold these into some slow-to-navigate menus instead. A shame, as the controls on the GF-1, which I have and love, are pretty great.

Panasonic may also be offering a new kit, with a 14mm 2.5 lens instead of the 20mm 1.7 found on the GF-1.

Hopefully Panasonic won’t mess this up. We should find out tomorrow, as the same rumor sources point to an announcement in the morning. Availability of the new model is not expected until 2011, so if this does turn out the be the LX-5 with interchangeable lenses it appears to be, you can still snap up the awesome little GF-1 before it ships.

Panasonic GF2 image spotted in Paris [43 Rumors]

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Miquel ngel Garca, head of Olympus Europe, has stated that his company will no longer make new Four Thirds lenses. In Japan, the smaller, mirrorless Micro Four Thirds cameras have already captured 40% of the market, and these cameras and their smaller lenses will be Olympus focus in future.

Garca spoke to Spanish site Quesabesde at this year’s Photokina show, and the whole interview is worth reading (it’s in Spanish, but Google’s translation is pretty good for once). While you will of course still be able to buy existing Four Thirds lenses, and Olympus hasn’t yet said it is giving up on Four Thirds bodies (like the brand-new E-5), it is clearly moving away from SLRs altogether. In fact, Garca thinks that interchangeable-lens compacts will break the Nikon-Canon duumvirate of the global camera market.

“But it is very important to have broken the DSLR market status quo” says Garca, “There are two brands that for years have been allocated 80% of the global market. And this will change.”

Olympus is, in some ways, like the Apple of the camera industry. Since the original half-frame Pen film camera, through the tiny SLRs it has made over the years and the Trip series of high-end compacts, Olympus has been an innovator. Garca mentions that his company was the first to add sensor-cleaning and live-view to its cameras. But Olympus is even more like Apple in its willingness to drop old technologies when it sees they are dying.

I have mentioned before that the SLR is destined to be a niche tool, something for professionals who need its flexibility, while the rest of us switch to mirrorless compacts. The commenters on that post vehemently disagreed, but it seems that at least one camera company thinks the same way.

No estamos desarrollando ms pticas Cuatro Tercios [Quesabesde]

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Samsung’s new NX100 is a cut-down version of its mirrorless NX10, coming on a like a compact camera to the NX10’s slimline SLR design. Like its older brother, the new camera has an APS-C-sized, 14.6 megapixel sensor and shoots 720p video. What it lacks is the bigger camera’s electronic viewfinder (although Samsung will sell you an add-on which slots into the hotshoe). But that’s not the point. The real news is in the lenses, which use something called “i-Function” to make the camera easier to use.

I-Function puts buttons on the lens itself. Hit the switch and you can then cycle through settings like white-balance, ISO, shutter speed, aperture and exposure compensation, controlling them by turning the focus ring on the lens. Yes, it has taken years of research and innovation (the word “innovative” is used six times in the press release) to finally put an aperture ring back on the lens, just where it had sat since time began.

Samsung is also changing the descriptions of its lenses. Now you can buy a “landscape lens” or a “portrait lens”, and these i-Function lenses will tell the camera what they are so the camera can configure its own settings. This is called lens-priority mode, and compatible lenses will have little icons on them to let you know just what they are. I really like the on-lens control idea, but the auto-settings business seems a little gimmicky, and maybe even pointless on a camera clearly aimed at an enthusiast, not a point-and-shooter.

There will be accessories, too. Joining the viewfinder will be a GPS unit, and there are two lenses at launch, a 20-50mm 3.5-5.6 zoom and a 20mm 2.8 pancake lens. Other NX lenses will work, too, but you don’t get the fancy new features.

Pricing and availability are yet to be revealed. Given that an NX10 can be had in a zoom kit for $700, my guess is that the street price will be $500 to $600. The camera will come in black and (as seen in the gallery below) brown.

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NX product page [Samsung: Not yet listing NX100]

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Panasonic has stopped teasing us with rendered mockups and whispered details for its forthcoming Micro Four Thirds camcorder, the AG-AF100, and has finally released details and photos. Let’s get the shocker out of the way first. It’ll be $10,000.

Why so much? Because it packs in a lot of pro features. Those thinking that this would be anything like the video-shooting Micro Four Thirds stills cameras will be disappointed: the only thing the cameras have in common is the large image-sensor and the lens-mount.

The range of shooting options is almost ridiculously large. You can record in anything up to 1080p (or 1080i) in AVCHD format, with options for the high-bitrate PH-mode. Frame-rates run from 12p up to 60p and sound is 2-channel Dolby Digital. The footage is captured into two SD-cards, and gives up to 48-hours of recording time depending on what quality and size you capture.

A video-camera isn’t a standalone unit. It needs to hook up to all sorts of other gear, and the Panasonic has all the right jacks. HD SDI-out and XLR-input join HDMI, USB, RCA audio-out and a detachable handle and grip for putting the camera into the center of a big rig, and the lenses can of course be changed just like on an SLR.

In fact, it’s these lenses that will likely be the most attractive feature of this camera. Because autofocus is almost never used in professional shooting, and because any number of amazing Leica, Nikon and other lenses can be put onto a Micro Four Thirds camera with cheap adapters, the lens options are almost endless. Fisheyes, super-zooms and fast primes can all be mounted and give filmic images at budget prices. Add to that the fact that by video-camera standards, $10,000 is pretty cheap, and Panasonic might be onto a winner.

Available December.

AG-AF100 product page [Panasonic]
AG-AF100 product page [Panasonic]

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Olympus has revealed two new lenses today, both for the Micro Four Thirds format. One is a 40-150mm 4.0-5.6 which will sell for just 330 when it is launched in October. This has a silent AF-motor for movie-shooting but is otherwise rather pedestrian thanks to those mediocre maximum apertures.

The other lens is way more interesting. It too has rather poor light-gathering abilities when wide-open (4.8-6.7), but that is excusable as it runs from 75-300mm. In 35mm terms, that’s a 150-600mm monster. Still not impressed? The lens weighs just 430-grams (15-ounces) and is only 116mm (4.6-inches) long.

For comparison, look at some SLR lenses. Nikon’s longest reaching zoom is the 200-400mm 4, which weighs 3360-grams or a wrist-breaking 7.4-pounds and measures 365mm or 14.4-inches. That, though, is still short of the Olympus’ 600mm far-end. To get to that number, you need to choose a prime lens from Nikon.

The Nikkor 600mm 4 weighs five kilos (11-pounds) and is a John Holmesian 166mm (17.5-inches) in length. To put that in perspective, the diameter of the Nikon is almost four times the length of the Olympus. Also, the Nikon will cost you $10,300.

This astonishing difference is due only to the lack of a mirror in the Micro Four Thirds cameras, and the smaller sensor (half the size of a 35mm-frame and around two-thirds the size of a typical DSLR). These lenses would have been possible on Leica rangefinders, too, but were impractical as there was no way to see through the lens and frame your shot. Digital live-view has changed that.

The 75-300mm Olympus will cost just 900 ($1,140, but certainly less when sold in the US) and will be in stores in December.

Olympus releases M.Zuiko Digital ED 75-300mm lens [DP Review]

Olympus introduces M.Zuiko Digital ED 40-150mm lens [DP Review]

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Panasonic is really into 3D. Not only will it sell you a big 3D television with which to watch the latest Hollywood head-spinners, it will soon sell you a lens which can be popped onto a G-series camera and shoot your own stereoscopic pics.

The lens is actually two lenses in a single, compact housing. When you shoot an photo or video, two pictures are captured simultaneously onto your sensor. Obviously this reduces the overall resolution of the resulting images, but with video this shouldn’t matter as the footage is down-sampled from the giant photo-sensor. This double-image (or video) is then turned into a 3D one in software, to be viewed on one of Panny’s TVs.

The lens has not yet been given a launch date or a price (other than a vague “end of the year”), so plenty of questions remain unanswered. Will cameras need a firmware update to use the lens? That seems almost certain. Also, how good will the stereoscopic effect be with the two lenses so close together? And I’m assuming here that the cameras will actually shoot 3D video: the press release only mentions still images, but who wants to view their photos on a TV screen?

Still, we love that Panasonic is making 3D an optional extra for its Micro Four Thirds system. It’s this kind of innovation that is currently leaving the likes of Nikon and Canon behind, and we’re all for it. And it shouldn’t be long before somebody hacks their way around the 3D format and lets us do something useful with the images instead of looking at them on a TV.

Panasonic developing world’s first interchangable 3D lens for Micro Four Thirds (Press release) [DP Review]

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