The new E-PL1 body now sells for $149 only at Amazon (Click here). If Olympus would have sold the E-PL1 for such a price right from the start they would probably have double the market share they have today :)
And in these days Amazon sells more E-PL1 cameras than Fuj X PRO 1 cameras :)
P.S.: If you need a zoom lens on it take a look at the Panasonic 45-200mm lens which also got a price drop and sells for $199 again at Amazon (Click here).
So pity! KTF-Turbo which is right now testing the Sonnetar 25mm f/1.1 m43 prototype lens just informed me that for now they decided to not go into mass production with the lens. He couldn’t unveil me the reason for that decision. I hope Mr. Miyazaki who is designer of the lens will rethink is decision. I like the design lens a lot and I think quite a great group of current m43 owners would have considered to purchase the lens.
Bye the way, the Sonnetar 25mm f/1.1 for Q mount already did it into mass production and is in Stock on [shoplink 30286 ebay]eBay (Click here)[/shoplink].
Yesterdays announcement was focused on the new Panasonic AVC PRO technology more than on real products. The new camcorder announcements will probably follow soon.
Sources told me that the new AVC PRO compression scheme will be implemented in future business and consumer camcorders. AVC PRO will be available in early 2013. The new cameras that will be unveiled for the NABshow can be upgraded to AVC-Ultra in 2013. It has to be seen yet if the AG-AF100 successor and the GH3 will include the new compression technology. We will probably know more about the products on Tuesday April 17th when Panasonic will have the official press session at the NAB show (at 03:40 PM Las Vegas time).
Meantime here are some info about AVC-Ultra via Wikipedia (Click here):
“The Panasonic AVC-Ultra family defines an additional three new encoding parameters within the MPEG-4 Part 10 standard, utilizing up to the 4:4:4 Intra Predictive Profile, as well as an additional low bitrate proxy recording mode.
The most efficient new parameter within AVC-Ultra is by Panasonic called, AVC-LongG. AVC-LongG enables compression of video resolutions up to 1920×1080 @ 23.97, 25 and 29.97p, with 10 bits of pixel depth at 4:2:2 color sampling, at data rates as low as 25 Mbit / sec.
More over, the AVC-Intra Class 50/100 is now extended to Class 200 and Class 4:4:4. The Class 200 mode extends the bitrate to 226 Mbit / sec for 1080/23,97p, while the Class 4:4:4 extends the possible resolution from 720p to 4K with pixel depths at 10 and 12 bits.
The bitrate settings for Class 4:4:4 varies between 200 and 440 Mbit / sec depending on the resolution, frame rate and bit depth. Both the Class 200 and the Class 4:4:4 are Intra-only coding modes.
The AVC-Proxy mode enables extremely fast ENG content delivery and offline edits of 720p and 1080p video at bitrates varying between 800 Kbit to 3,5 Mbit / sec at 8 bits of pixel depth.”
More info about yesterdays Panasonic announcement at Tvtechnology (Click here).
Click on picture to see the full size version
Oly5050 from Clubsnap (Click here) posted a set of nice pictures of the new E-M5 along the superb Carl Zeiss Sonar f/1.5 (on the left of the image) and the upcoming new Olympus 75mm f/1.8 lens. That lens will arrive this summer and NOT be weather sealed. The exact price is unknown but it will be certainly higher than the Olympus 45mm f/1.8 price ($399 at Amazon now). Some unconfirmed rumors from external websites say the price in between $700-$800. The lens is so good on the new [shoplink 29074]Olympus E-M5[/shoplink]!
Loading ...Here are two more pictures (Click on them to enlarge):
E-M5 (Pre)order links (Click on store name): Amazon, Adorama, B&H, Jessops, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon Japan and Digitalrev.
Today Rankings:
USA: E-M5 on position 8/13 (Click here)
UK: E-M5 bad ranked (Click here).
Germany: The E-M5 is on position 4 (Click here).
France: not available (Click here to see rankings anyway).
Japan: E-M5 on position 6/13/16 (Click here).
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Surprise! The new Nokton 17.5mm f/0.95 lens which actually was supposed to ship on April 29th only is already in Stock on [shoplink 30300 ebay]eBay Germany (Click here)[/shoplink]! It ships worldwide!!!
It is also available as kit lens in combination with the [shoplink 30301 ebay]GF3 (Click here to check)[/shoplink] with the [shoplink 30302 ebay]E-P2 (Click here to check)[/shoplink] and with the [shoplink 30303 ebay]E-P3 (Click here to check)[/shoplink].
The store is well known and trust worthy. And they ship worldwide! So be fast and grab the lens if you want it now!
P.S.: The only short test you can find about that lens has been made by OpenPN (Click here to read the google translation).
As you know a couple of days ago I posted a FT3 rumor (50% chance the rumor is correct) to say that there could be a new Panasonic camcorder announcement. Panasonic advertised the event as “camcorder presentation” but in fact it turned out to be more “a look into the future discussion” than a real product announcement. Here are the news:
1) AVC-Ultra compression scheme. Panaosnic said: “So we have AVC-Intra Class 200, AVC-Intra Class 4:4:4, up to 2K and 4K resolution, and we also have a technology called AVC-LongG, which can get down to 25 Mbps. All of these are recordable on a Panasonic P2 media card.”
2) Panasonic will introduce new cameras at NAB that can be upgraded to AVC-Ultra in 2013. There are not many details about the products that will be shown at the NABshow.
Source: Tvtechnology
Over 6,400 unique voters selected the favorite future Micro Four Thirds lens wish list. You can see the poll and full results here: https://www.43rumors.com/poll-vote-your-future-micro-four-thirds-wish-list/.
While this doesn’t pretend to be a scientific analysis there are certainly some general tendency we can extract from the results:
1) There is a high need for high quality zooms. Currently the m43 systems offers many zoom lenses but none is really fast. And that is something our m43 readers highly do miss.
2) The most requested lens is the Micro Four Thirds version of the popular [shoplink 23681 ebay]Four Thirds 12-60mm f/2.8-3.5 weather sealed[/shoplink]. The current 12-50mm slow zoom isn’t enough for you!
3) While Panasonic is about to launch their f/2.8 X zoom lenses the 43rumors readers are still demanding faster f/2.0 zooms. Probably influenced by the superb (and expensive) [shoplink 25320 ebay]Olympus 14-35mm[/shoplink] and [shoplink 25119 ebay]35-100mm f/2.0[/shoplink] lenses you asked for new m43 12-35mm f/2.0, 12-50mm f/2.0 and 35-100mm f/2.0 zooms. I asked you to take into consideration that those lenses would be very expensive. I hope your emotional part of the brain didn’t fully overrun the logic :)
The Olympus 14-35mm f/2.0 costs over $2,000 at Amazon right now (Click here). So be prepared to pay a lot for these lenses if Olympus/Panasonic will ever release them for real!
4) The most requested prime lenses are the 17mm f/1.4 and 25mm f/1.2 weather sealed high quality lenses. I voted for them too ;)
5) Interesting to notice that the most requested pancakes are again having the same focal length of the top quality primes: 17mm f/2.0 and 25mm f/1.8 pancake.
Overall high quality and weather sealed lenses with wide up to normal focal length and fast aperture are requested. Surprisingly there is not a high demand for tele lenses. Do you found other interesting aspects from the poll results?
P.S.: Thank you all for the talking part in this. If I get soem feedback from Olympus/Panasonic soruces I will let you know what they think about it!
