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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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Source:wired.com

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Until a review unit arrives at Olympus Spanish PR Office (amazingly just around the corner from my apartment) Im slurping up anything and everything I can find on the web about the EP-1, or digital Pen camera. And its not just journalistic professionalism, either: As an amateur photographer, Im excited by a camera that could actually deliver on the promise of a compact digicam which works as well as an old film compact.

Non-DSLR cameras have a few problems which make them a pain for anyone serious about their photos, and this is why Im scouring the web: to find out if the Pen has solved them. And the answers so far appear to be yes, yes and yes.

First up is shutter lag. Youll know it as the sluggish pause between hitting the button and the camera actually snapping a picture. One of the causes is the non-mechanical shutter. The Pen has a real (if quiet) clunk-click shutter. Reports say that shutter lag is all but unnoticeable.

The second problem with compacts is their tiny sensors. The Pen has a Micro Four Thirds sensor, half the size of a 35mm frame but still way bigger than those in even high-end compacts. And it seems that this sensor has low-light noise licked: Take a look at this shot , taken by Derrick Story. Its a jpeg, straight from the camera, shot at ISO 6400. As Flickr commenter Swiss James says, “Sold.” Throw the image into Adobe Lightroom and add a few tweaks and you get a rather nice, grainy B&W version (below, thanks to Derrick for licensing his images under the Creative Commons).

The other problem is focussing. DSLRs use phase detection to focus very fast. Compacts (and DSLRs in live view mode) use contrast detection, which is a lot slower. The Pen uses this, too, prompting fears that it would be sluggish in use. Photographer James Duncan Davidson took it for a spin:

But what I can say is that autofocus speed is reasonable. Its not as fast as the autofocus system on my D700 bodies, but its a heck of a lot faster than any compact camera Ive used.

[M]anual focusing works like a charm. When you turn the focusing ring, the viewfinder zooms in letting you judge critical focus. You can move your zoomed view around the photo with the control pad if youre not in the right place. And, the focus ring [] has a nice feel [] With a bit of practice full-on manual focus should be easy as pie, if youre into that kind of thing.

Thats right. It has a manual focusing ring, although you still need to stare at the LCD to see if you have got it right. And if Olympus had actually included a depth-of-field scale on the lenses, you could easily use that to set and forget a hyperfocal distance, just like the street photographers of old.

Finally, theres the problem of the viewfinder. Amongst other niggles, Canons G9 fails as a serious camera because the optical viewfinder is so small as to be unusable. The Pen gets around this by shipping a big-looking finder with the 17mm lens. Accessory finders are nothing new, but they are dead handy for fast framing and even the cheap old Soviet ones I have owned have been bright, big and sharp. So far, though, I have read nothing about this finder.

Well find out for sure when we get our hands on one (Im in a race with Wired.com editor Dylan Tweney to see who can get one first). Until then, what Im reading is making me more, not less, excited.

Olympus E-P1 ISO 6400 [Flickr/Derrick Story]
Quick Olympus E-P1 Hands On [Duncan Davidson]
New York City Shoot to Test the Olympus E-P1 DSLR [Digital Story]

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