That news surprised me on Saturday. I worked the full weekend and I had no time to analyze interview until now. Thanks to our readers we can now get a bit into the detail of the japanese interview with Olympus Manager Mr. Ogawa made by Impressjapan (Click here to download the pdf of the magazine).
First important news: Olympus is working on a mirrorless camera with emphasis on the viewfinder.
Ogama also said the new mirrorless will have an “epoch-making” viewfinder and that they will announce it soon!!! So this sounds definitely more advanced than any current solution from Sony (OLED viewfinder) or Fuji (hybrid viewfinder). Ogawa recognizes that electronic viewfinder have a huge advantages (framing, easier to magnify, easier to focus) but he also recognizes that people misses the “feeling” of optical viewfinders. He doesn’t unveil the “big secret” but he says: “All I can say is, when you look through the viewfinder, you’ll understand….”.
Second important news: It’s different than current NEX’s and it will be announced soon.
The first news is that it will have a viewfinder but…this can either mean that they will do a DSLR alike camera or a rangefinder alike camera. MR. Ogawa said it’s different than current NEX cameras. That includes the [shoplink 25396 ebay]NEX-7[/shoplink]. So does it have a classic “DSLR” design? The next series will represent a new stage in the mirrorless camera, but it will be fully compatible with the PEN series. It will be a camera that you want to hold in your hands all the time. The interviewer asked him if it is different not just from current Olympus mirrorless cameras, but from mirrorless cameras in general and Mr. Ogawa’s answer was…YES :)
Pretty exciting or not? I confess, now some of the rumors I got in these months do make sense. It will be a busy time now for me and I am happy that I can report rumor related Olympus posts instead of all that pretty bad Olympus financial mess news. Stay tuned! I will do my best to give you some more “insider” news soon!