GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

LAS VEGAS — Olympus has announced the rather hot-looking XZ1, and enthusiast compact camera which goes up against the Panasonic LX-5, the Canon G12 and Nikon’s P7000.

As befits this kind of camera, gimmicks are kept to a minimum, and pro-level features dominate. Thus there is a large 1/1.63-inch sensor (similar to the 1/1.7-inch sensor in the Canon G12 and S95) with 10 megapixels, a very fast lens (1.8 at 28mm rising to a still great 2.5 at 112mm). Maximum ISO is a see-in-the-dark 6400, and up top you’ll find an accessory shoe for an optional electronic viewfinder and a flash. And speaking of flash, the XZ1 can wirelessly control off-camera flashes, too.

The metal-fronted XZ1 shares its image processor chip (TruPic V) with the current Pen Micro Four Thirds camera, and puts a 3-inch OLED screen on the back (with a decent but not class-leading 621,000 dots). And while other manufacturers ([cough] Panasonic [cough]) seem intent on doing away with manual controls, Olympus has put a wheel on the back and a ring around the lens which can be set to the function of your choice.

Inside you have RAW capture and AVI Motion JPEG capture of 1280 x 720, AF tracking and a handful of fancy color-tweaking modes. And that’s about it.

Pending testing, this looks like a very solid competitor in the high-end compact field. It’s a little bigger than the Canon S95 and the Panasonic LX-5, but way smaller than the G12, and costs $500. Available now, if you can find one.

Olympus XZ1 product page [Olympus]

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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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Olympus SLR boss Toshiyuki Terada has said that the company will make no more entry-level SLRs. Speaking in an interview, Terada said that “We do not have concrete plans to replace the E-620 and other recent SLRs.”

But don’t worry, Olympus isn’t about to dump the SLR category altogether – yet. While Terada says that “the entry level SLR class can be completely replaced by the Pen system in terms of performance,” the company will continue to support the higher-end SLR market for the immediate future.

In fact, Olympus plans on adding ever more powerful cameras to the Pen lineup and sending all of its customers, even the pros, over to the mirrorless Micro Four Thirds format. And that’s not all. Olympus is also planning on a new range of high-performance compacts.

The first of these cameras will appear next year and will have a very fast lens and “good image quality in comparison to other compacts.” It will also have an electronic port that will be compatible with existing Micro Four Thirds accessories, such as the plug-in optical viewfinders. It seems that the sensors will be smaller than those found in the Micro Four Thirds bodies, but the machine translation (from Polish, which I find impossible) makes this unclear. Any Polish readers care to help out?

I guess there are no surprises here. The mirrorless format is better than an SLR for the majority of photographers, and Olympus has always been a leader in next-gen camera tech. One thing is certain: now that film-shackled camera design is finally being abandoned, we might start to see the full potential of digital photography.

We talk to Toshiyuki Terada of Olympus [Fotopolis via Photorumors via Photography Bay]

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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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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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