New Olympus patent discloses phase detection and optical viewfinder adapter for MicroFourThirds

The japanese website Egami found a new Olympus patent (Google translation doesn’t work very well). I tried to make a small summary:

* Patent publication number 2010-152140 published on 2010/07/08  and filled 2008/12/25

The following patent discloses an adapter (in blue) that adds phase detection and optical viewfinder to current MicroFourThirds cameras. This is not a new concept, we already saw that with the Leica Visoflex (click here to see the Visoflex on eBay).

Such an adapter makes sense because phase detection autofocus is still much faster than the current contrast autofocus system of MicroFourThirds cameras. And not few of us will like the idea to have an optical viewfinder instead of the sometimes noisy and not good enough electronic viewfinder.

That could be also the final solution to merge FourThirds and MicroFourThirds (but that’s just speculation for now!).

UPDATE: Olybold has taken a nice picture of the Leica Visoflex on the Panasonic G1 (Many Thanks!!!)