The first Micro Four-Thirds camera and leses dropped today from panasonic… DPreview has the hands on preview here
I have to say, my initial reaction was “somewhat dissapointed”. The thing looks just like a regular SLR. I thought the whole point of getting rid of the mirror box was to, well, get rid of the mirror box! What’s with the big hump on top and pseudo-optical finder. The whole point of this was to make a more compact interchangeable camera, so why do it half-assed? Get rid of the finder completely, and either use EVF exclusively, or make a rangefinder style add on finder that mounts to the hotshoe. (coupling it to the zoom would be easy). Speaking of which – no primes? Yeah, I know it’s just the first announcement, but “compact” camera system just *screams* for primes. The 14-42 zoom it comes with is just “meh”. To be fair, there is a 20mm f/1.7 on the roadmap for 2009 (40mm equiv – awesome), but hey – lets see a 12mm and a 40mm too.
After reading more of DPreview’s preview however, I was slightly mollified. From the comparison images the thing *does* look pretty small (and light – 630 grams *with* battery and lens? holy cow!) Check HERE for some size comparison and “in hand” images
from the reports, the biggest technical hurdle (making a usable contrast-detection AF) has been handled nicely as well, seems like AF is fine (and it has a built in AF assist light).
So what’s the verdict?
Well, it’s definitely cool, and I think a step in the right direction for opening up a new niche in the industry *but* I think they could have done more. If you’re selling the concept of “small and light” go all the way – commit to the true rangefinder form factor, lose the big grip on the right side, lose the bulky pop up flash (stick it on the side if you must a-la the lumix LX3). Oh yeah, and let’s see those primes.
Give us something like THIS
Honestly if it was something like one of those renderings, I probably would have sold my G9 and bought one on the spot. As it is, I’ll wait and see what comes down the pipe
(and Olympus hasn’t announced anything yet, so fingers-crossed)
To be fair, the less-than-innovative design was explained thusly in the dpreview piece:
“From the outside it looks for all the world like a conventional SLR (albeit a very small one) – we’re told that the design (complete with faux prism ‘hump’) is deliberately conservative; Panasonic’s research has shown that its target market (particularly in Japan) still prefers a camera that looks like a camera is supposed to, and wasn’t going to risk falling at the first hurdle by producing something too radical.”
I too would have loved a RF-like form factor, but hopefully that’s in the future!
Yes, that’s true – I missed that in my initial skim of the article. Hopefully that indicates that they might play with some more RF like designs in the future.
I’m also curious to see if olympus will announce a MFT body as well…
We need pancake primes and a smaller body!
Not bad for a start though.
[...] my initial reaction of “meh” to Panasonic’s first micro-four thirds entry, I was eagerly anticipating Olympus’ [...]