A good article about the promise/problems of the Micro Four Thirds system I mentioned a couple of days ago.
And another one.
The upshot of the whole thing is that if this thing pans out as it should, we might in a year or two be looking at cameras with about the image quality of, say, the Nikon D80 (top notch), but half the size and half the weight. They may not be cheaper though, and they may be a little slower, we'll see.
8 comments:
I'm old enough to remember the Olympus Pen F, a half-frame 35mm SLR that replaced the typical pentaprism with a mirror. Could Olympus reinvent the Pen F SLR format as a Micro 4/3 SLR?
It is doubtful if there is space enough in a M4/3 camera for any mirror, even one which does not have to flip up. There's only 20mm room.
Could a prism arrangement be made so that 80% of the light went to the viewfinder and 20% went to the sensor - the sensor being made responsive to this portion of available light.
Otherwise, why not a small LCD screen in the viewfinder, so its operation felt like an SLR, even though we were looking at a screen. This way the screen would show what we were shooting, and would be immune to ambient light - the biggest problem with LCDs on the back of the camera.
Both things have been done, and will again.
The "Pellicle" mirror, though, steals light.
And I have a Nikon 2400 with a "EVF" electronic viewfinder. Problem is it looks very, very pixillated. (It's three years old though, maybe they could do them better now.)
I like the LCD myself.
"Problem is it looks very, very pixillated"
And I kinda doubt they will ever be able to make a good EVF with LCD technology (small enough to fit in an SLR or micro 4/3, that is).
But I wonder how small a DLP-based display could be? That would be awesome, a fast and bright EVF with potentially great resolution... let's keep hope!
Something just popped in my mind: an EVF doesn't have to be attached to the camera! That would beat any tilting/rotating screen scheme by a mile. Imagine having an eyepiece allowing you to see the image while arranging the composition elements... a gadget, but a neat one for many odd situations.
Oh yes, you could have one of those floating virtual images in front of one eye, while having the camera anywhere. Maybe it could even connect by bluetooth or wireless. Kool. (What a thing for candid photography.)
"Imagine having an eyepiece allowing you to see the image while arranging the composition elements"
You can already do that! Many cameras (including live view SLR's like Oly E-520) have a TV-out port that you can connect a pair of video glasses to. The signal from the LCD screen is then sent to those glasses instead.
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