Olympus Pen

[Jonny69]

Well, I thought this was going to be the camera I was waiting for all my life. Compact body with removeable lenses like an SLR, but I find there's no viewfinder so I'm totally disappointed because I can't get used to using an LCD screen to shoot with. It's just almost there but not quite and at £700 I can't live with that, so I'll stick with my trusty 350D for now.

Review here: http://www.dpreview.com/previews/olympusep1/

(I haven't read it properly yet)

What are your opinions?

[LeperousDust]

Isn't that the point with the micro four thirds standard though, the way its designed is to save space they lose the penta prism which means you can't physicall have a view finder...

[Jonny69]

I can't work out what the originals had, but they don't seem to have a viewing window off to the side of the lens so I can only guess they looked through the viewfinder. If that's the case then it's a shame they can't squeeze it in the digi model. I guess it's what the market demands though.

[LeperousDust]

Yeah i guess thats your choice, you choose full size with a real viewfinder, or a new standard much smaller but lose it to shave that space... In fact reading that article has a great little picture pointing out the obvious physical difference inside. Still they're promising, but obviously not going to replace a typical four thirds right now...

http://a.img-dpreview.com/previews/OlympusEP1/images/MicroFourThirdsDiag2-001.jpg

Looking at that picture i'm not entirely sure what the physical limitations are but as you can see its deliberately missing the penta prism

[Mark]

That is indeed the point of Micro Four Thirds. They've done away with the mirror box and shortened the focus distance to allow them to use a smaller body. The Panasonic G1 (another micro four-thirds interchangeable lens camera) gets around this by using an EVF.

I'm not sure how they could solve that one as you can't even use a straight through viewfinder because of the interchangeable lenses.