Olympus and Panasonic set the standard for smaller SLR cameras

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old_camera.jpgI always feel intimidated when I go on to the photo sharing website Flickr. Whereas I can feel a smug sense of superiority towards commentators on YouTube, as they’re mostly idiotic fundamentalists or 9/11 conspiracy theorists, on Flickr, the comments don’t talk about what’s actually in the photos: it could be a kitten, or even incontrivertable photographic evidence for the existence of the Loch Ness Monster – and yet they’re always talking about how good or bad the composition of a photo is.

Because my digital camera is of the cheap “point and shoot” variety, I always feel rubbish in comparison to the Flickrati and their £1000 SLR beasts and their beautifully framed shots of, well, mostly artsy cityscapes. This could all be about to change though thanks to a new technology developed by Olympus and Matsushita.

They’ve come up with a new technology that will make SLR cameras smaller and lighter, hopefully to the point where you won’t need a neck-strap to carry one around.

Olympus and Matsushita (who are Panasonic over here) hope that their new “Micro Four Thirds System” will become the new open standard for SLR lenses (instead of the old “Four Thirds System”) so that the whole industry will shrink down and make an multi-lensed SLR camera a more reasonable proposition for normal people.

Ironically, neither company decided to offer up any photographs of any new products that use this technology.

(via Reuters)

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James O’Malley
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