« MAC ENVY — the cure | Main | [ REVIEW – SONY DSC-P150 ] »
May 12, 2005
OLYMPUS NEWS
OLYMPUS has had a bad year, according to a news report in the British online digital photography ezine Let's Go Digital. The word from Olympus management is that although revenue from digital camera sales was up profits were down. The company intends to make part of its fightback the release of two new "high end" digital SLRs.
They will need to do better than the company has done with the E-1 "four thirds" format camera. While the E-1 is a superb camera it was widely regarded as being over-priced on its release and the price has dropped dramatically. When the camera was released it had a RRP of about $5000. It is now selling for $3000.
The E-1 suffered from too few pixels [5 megapixels] for the price and no backwards compatibility of lenses with Olympus film SLRs. There are adapters for OM lenses, but this is hardly comparable with Canon, Nikon and Pentax policy of backwards compatibility with all their auto focus lenses.
And is the four thirds system ever going to appear in any other manufacturer's cameras? It seems increasingly unlikely, which makes the Olympus look like the Betamax of digital cameras — technically superior, perhaps, but ultimately consumer unfriendly.
*
Posted by terry at May 12, 2005 04:58 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://bleedingedge.com.au/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/305
Comments
Consumers of digital SLR's use megapixels as one of their benchmarks in assesing a camera.
The four-thirds sensor is a smaller size than most digital SLR's currently produced. Even with huge advances in technology it will never be able to contain as many pixels compared to the larger sized sensors.
This is unfortunate for Olympus as they have always produced excellent lenses and have been leaders in innovative technology but this time the four-thirds system will be their downfall.
Posted by: AB at May 18, 2005 12:03 PM
actually, thats not true
some competitor cameras have been using CMOS sensors which are burdened by a much lower fill factor than CCD's. So in that sense, the CMOS will always have less definition. Where they have been winning with CMOS is with less noise, an advantage that is getting shorter each year.
The appearance of the Fuji F30 which is iso3200 capable, and pretty clean at 800iso, and this from a 1/1.7" sensor (way less than a four thirds) closes the gap significantly. At this time Four thirds are about 2 stops behind CMOS cameras with noise, the scene is set to change when E3 appears. The huge advantage of 2 stops you mention....is within grasp.
Riley
Posted by: Riley at December 29, 2006 04:53 PM