43 Rumors

this is good stuff i guess especially the flash. Its my favorite flash design, and maybe the body of it could be even smaller if they use some kind of LiMH chargable battery to power it.

” A couple of sources confirmed that the 40-150 II R is coming too.” Shouldn’t it be a 40-150 R ? Or did they redesign it completly? And what a bout a 17 R ? Or isn’t that lens bundled anymore ?

> improve the dynamic range, color fidelity and autofocus speed

I don’t have the original source to look at for that statement, but…those three specific things say to me that this is a sensor redesign, not a from-scratch design. Let’s do it backwards:

* Autofocus speed: highly dependent upon how fast you get data off the sensor. There are two basic ways to do this: up the frame rate and sub-sample the pixels, preferably both. This is work mostly in the add-on circuitry in a CMOS sensor. It doesn’t touch the sensel itself (other than how fast it is taking information from it).

* Color fidelity: highly dependent upon the Bayer filtration. We’ve been all over the map on this one during digital’s history, increasing filtration, decreasing it, flipping it to CYMG instead of RGBG, you name it. It’s an optical issue, and Olympus is an optical company.

* Dynamic range: can be dependent upon a lot of things, including sensel efficiency, read noise, microlenses, and so on. But read this and the previous one together and I get “Olympus changed the layers on the top of the sensor.”

I’m guessing here, but it’s quite possible that Olympus really meant it when they said 12mp is enough (it isn’t, but for different reasons than most people think, and Lytro is a good example of that). With Panasonic showing them sensors with similar traits but more pixels, Olympus might have simply asked to be given access to the original sensor design for improvement. So they put engineers working on the two easiest things to tweak: the photosite support circuitry (goosing the bandwidth) and the filtration layers (Bayer, microlenses). This would also explain why Panasonic is the fab.

I’ll be watching the details in the Japanese press when the release happens. What I’m looking for is evidence that the sensel is changed or different, or that the underlying transistor type is changed. Differences in substrate materials or flipping the sensor (BSI) are also fundamental design changes. Those are all things that would indicate a ground-up sensor design. But based upon what we’re hearing as leaks, I’d bet this is a reconfiguration of an existing sensor.