43 Rumors

Still no af-tracking test which is where the difference really matters, but the E-P3 is certainly really fast !

As for noise, well, I still prefer a 16Mp APS-C to 12Mp m43 for noise, but it is clearly better than previous PENs.

Good job Oly !

Faster is better, ok. But it’s worthless if I can’t track my two years old son with his bobby car. My 5DII is fast enough (= I never had an issue, not one, with focus on not moving things), but tracking is really something else. If the new Olympus also win this discipline I’m in.

Seems the Panasonic’s higher MP sensor is still a good bit better. The extra processing power and latest Raw images seem to suggest the sensor on the P3 isn’t really improved much other than maybe bandwidth to do the faster focus if you read the tea leaves. The dynamic range and better high ISO stuff seems a lot related to better JPEG processing more than better sensor output. The color output from the sensor may be improved a bit also, but I think we need more official Raw filters to really know just what all was improved on the sensor for certain. Seems quite clear though it isn’t an extreme low noise high ISO monster that a modern 12mp probably COULD be in 4/3rds size if done from the ground up as such by someone with vast experience designing them like Nikon, Panasonic, or Canon.

Still and awesome camera for Oly though! I am just one who wants a true low light not so high resolution monster of a sensor that we should have by now.

I’ll get mine in less than one week. MSRP here is HKD7,390 and Olympus HK confirmed that the camera will be delivered on July 13.

It is obvious that we now have two m43 “enthusiast cameras”, G3 and EP3, that are better than previous generation. That should be no surprise! Probably the IQ diffenences between them are more on the pixel-peeping level than anything else.
Concerning RAW comparison; Different RAW converters produce different results, some of the more obscure RAW converters are pretty lousy. So will rest myjudgement until the big guns have support for these cameras.
There is one difference though: Price. An EP1 with EVF costs twice as much as a G3! You can buy a very good lens for that difference.
Just tested my G3 with Zeiss 50/1,7: Excellent! Color, detail, contrast… Far better than 20/1,7 and all the zooms. (The Zeiss did very well on my EP1 too will do a compare when rain stops)

NEX versus mFT: Here is my “milkmaid computation” comparing these two sensor sizes:

sqrt(23.4 * 15.6) / sqrt(17.3 * 13) = 1.27

The ratio of the square roots of that areas gives us the linear scale factor 1.27. Hence, the weight factor is 1.27^3 = 2.07.

Therefore, a lens just scaled up from mFT to NEX is expected to weigh more than twice as much. I would suggest to introduce a “glass factor” besides the well known crop factor. Is it worth to carry around 4 kg of lenses instead of 2 kg in order to achieve such minor improvements in image quality? For my needs, FT/mFT is fortunately good enough. Full frame compared to FT has a “glass factor” 7.54, i.e. 100 g of glass in a FT lens correspond to 754 g of glass in a comparably designed FF lens (or 1.64 kg in a Hasselblad lens). These considerations on glass volumes show us that there are three dimensions in engineering — only the photographic image is two dimensional