The japanese website DC.watch (Click here for the terrible google translation) interviewed the Olympus E-M5 developer team. Sadly the google translation tool makes a bad job and it’s quite frustrating to read the text. From what I understood there is no BIG info. But may you read it and let me know if you found something I missed. P.S.: They said that there is no significant difference between the amount of Silver or Black E-M5 pre orders. At the same time DC.watch posted an E-m5 review too!

Meantime DSRLcheck keeps posting new mirrorless camera comparisons:
RAW ISO comparison between the XPRO 1, NEX-7, E-M5, GX1 and E-PM1: http://dslr-check.info/2012/0416.jpg
50mm JPEG comparison between the X PRO 1 and E-M5: http://dslr-check.info/2012/0418b.jpg

Japan is already shipping the E-M5 and it is the most sold mirrorless camera at Amazon Japan (See the links below to open the charts):

Today Rankings:
USA: E-M5 on position 8/10/12/17 (Click here)
UK: E-M5 is on position 19 (Click here).
Germany: The E-M5 is on position 12/15 (Click here).
France: not available (Click here to see rankings anyway).
Japan: E-M5 on position 1/9/10/13 (Click here).

E-M5 (Pre)order links (Click on store name): Amazon, Adorama, B&H, Jessops, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon Japan and Digitalrev.

The first E-M5 camera is now in Stock at Adorama (Click here). And BHphoto (Click here) changed the status from “available April 16th” to “releasd in limited quantity“. But keep an eye on that superdeal: Panaosnic 45-200mm zoom lens is now in Stock for $199 at Amazon (Click here). That lens also got a firmware update…see Panasonic Japan (Click here).

For those of you that own (or will soon own) the Olympus E-M5 there is a new firmware update (Source: Olympus Imaging). These are the new features/fixes:

• Issue of updates stopping while updating firmware has been resolved.
• Image stabilizer function when using the following lenses has been modified: ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 8mm F3.5 Fisheye, ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 18-180mm F3.5-6.3, LEICA D VARIO-ELMAR 14-150mm

Panasonic just announced new PRO stuff but no new Micro Four Thirds camcorder. But I guess we will know more tomorrow when Panaosnic will have the official press event. They may disclose some more info about their intentions with the Micro Four Thirds video “intentions”.

more pices and info at Electronista.

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]!

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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).

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!

Back in January Panasonic announced three new converters. But since there I haven’t found any of these in Stock in any country I checked. The Panasonic DMW-GWC1GU wide angle converter is listed at Amazon Germany (Click here) but there is no info about the availability and no preorder option. Did you hear some news about them?

UPDATE: All converters are listed at Panasonic.net (Click here).