Thom Hogans m4/3 considerations

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Thom Hogan is one of the most famous Nikon reviewers (bythom.com). Normally he is only active inside the nikon dpreview forum, writing very interesting articles. But now he made a small jump into the Olympus dpreview forum. Maybe he is ready for the E-P1? ;)

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An interesting excerpt (dpreview):

“I almost always have big pockets available to me. Either a vest or a jacket or sometimes even cargo pockets on my pants/shorts. Likewise the small fanny pack I wear when running/biking. If the camera and lens combos I want fit there, I have a winner. The LX3, G10, Ricoh G200, even DP2 all fall into that category. All have liabilities that I think m4/3 would solve, though.”

and…

“It’ll also give Oly the first real burst of significant growth and market share change they’ve had in a long time.”

and finally…

“So what would I do if I were Oly?

1. Kill most of the full 4/3 models. Create consumer m4/3 and high-end m4/3.

2. Followup to the E-3 needs a big size reduction (about the same amount as I need to reduce personally ;~).

3. Introduce a mFX (full frame). Small size, high performance full frame. Nikon and Canon have left that hole for anyone to exploit.”

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I just want to say that Thom is one of the most serious, competent and friendly people I have met inside the dpreview forum. His website is worth visiting!

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For german readers…

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The RED Panasonic GH1 is avaiable and ready for shipping at amazon.de and the price is the best one I have found in german shops (idealo.de). There is no black model yet.

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Olympus Hongkong

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After Berlin and London Olympus has announced an event on June 16th in Hong Kong!

http://www.olympus.com.hk/olympus/tc/home.html

Exact location is the Eaton Hotel No. 380 Nathan Road, Kowloon,  2nd Floor

If one of you goes to the Berlin, London or Hong Kong events feel free to share your experience on 43rumors.com. I will post your impressions and photos!

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Panasonic GH1 firmware will upgrade the compression rate from 17Mb/s to 24Mb/s?

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I received an email from Alex which I found very interesting:
I’ve seen on forum that the limitation to 17Mb/s compress schema is a choice from Panasonic. If you check Wikipedia, you can read that AVCHD has 2 bitstream rate 17Mb/s and 24Mb/s. The choice for the 17Mb/s rather 24Mb/s come from that the 24Mb/s has some compatibility problem with some hardware. The good news, it seem that Panasonic could update his firmware for to support the 24Mb/s, some forum related that some people from Panasonic confirm that a future firmware could be support this feature in the GH1.

Panasonic has selected AVCHD because this is a consummer format and for the compatibility you take 17Mb/s.

The problem is for the future with this codec you have a limitation to 24Mb/s and we can’t expected to see better video in GH-2 if AVCHD is the only video codec.”

I hope it is true, 17Mb/s is subject to artifacts when the image is full of detail.

Thanks Alex for sharing the news!

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