Olympus

Olympus today continued the game of cat-and-mouse that is the land of Micro Four Thirds cameras with their new PEN EP-2. The new shooter, which comes on the half-iversary of the EP-1, is chasing Panasonic's much-lauded GF1 but feels unlikely to overtake it.

Sometimes looking to the past to inspire designs of the future is inspired by nothing more than fashion, but sometimes, it actually serves a functional purpose. Enter Olympus's freshly announced EP-1, which recreate a form factor we haven't seen a lot of since the film era: a sleek, compact body with interchangeable lenses.

The big news in cameras is actually pretty small. A new format with the wonky name “micro four thirds” (referring to the image sensor’s size and 4:3 aspect ratio), combines the interchangeable lenses of an SLR with the compact body of a point-and-shoot. The first model, Panasonic’s G1, is about the size of the most petite SLRs but uses even smaller lenses. A design concept from Olympus shows the potential for more-diminutive future models.

Size is an issue with cameras. I miss a lot of good shots when I don’t feel like lugging around a hefty SLR (such as my current fav, the Nikon D90). And while my pocket camera (presently a Canon SD800) is easy to tote, the image quality is more for “snapshots” than “photographs.”

I, and a few other shutterbugs around the Popular Science office, have been looking into the middle category of cameras: big enough to take good pictures, but not so big that it’s a burden. Now is a good time to look, since several camera makers have fresh midsize camera offerings.

There is no single measure of autofocus ability, so we did two main tests to judge the cameras chops. The first was to see how well each camera performed in difficult situations: low light and subjects with very little detail. In the second, we picked subjects that are easy to get in focus and simply measured how fast each camera could do it.

This was our setup:

Lenses