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Page 1 of 4 Good Things Come in Small Packages The New Pen Writes Olympus into History. Again.
By Khen Lim, Zone-10 (Above) Olympus’ revolutionary Micro Four-Thirds pioneer evokes the Pen of 1959 © Copyright Olympus Imaging Corporation 2009. All Rights Reserved.
They say good things come in small packages. Well, Swiss watch manufacturers would agree. Then again every decent Japanese carmaker also knows something about this a long time ago when small wasn’t fashionable. And of course, transistorised radios first materialised in Japan back in the late fifties.
The advent of the digital SLR market was blemished right from the beginning and the reason was simple – Olympus wasn’t there to stir things up. And so there were at least ten years when dinosaurs returned to rule. Things went weirdly bloated, big, heavy, cumbersome and unwieldy. For Olympus to make their return, they would have to spend many long hard summers turning things around and basically that was what happened, culminating in the new Olympus Pen, the E-P1.
(Left above) The E-P1 in an interesting size comparison with its larger E-series siblings © Copyright Olympus Imaging Corporation 2009. All Rights Reserved.
The two bones of contention for what constitutes ‘modern wisdom’ in the industry is that for a camera to be a highfaluting performer, it has to be big and that at every turn, all sorts of numbers tell the best full story of image quality. On both counts, the mass market has been mesmerised. After all, no one can discount the pure and simple logic of numbers. One adds one will always be two and everyone knows how to count two. And two yesterday will always be two tomorrow. There’s nothing more definite or better defined than the superiority of measuring image quality using quantifiable numbers. That’s what the industry has been forcing on to the market. And rather unfortunately, it’s been very successful.
The world according to Olympus was never supposed to be like this but along the way the company made some gaffes about how many megapixels it would not go beyond, the latest of which was Watanabe’s pronouncement that 12 might just be enough. Whether that’s going to hold up or not is not the point. The point is how much more Olympus can do to refine image quality in ways that numbers cannot tell. However one thing is very clear at Olympus – the company is very interested in the older world of ‘romantic’ photography, a world where skills and techniques were important, a world defined by craft as much as luck but surely not wholesale mathematical numbers.
The new Olympus Pen – the E-P1 – holds many clues to where the company wants to go. It’s not wizard science to predict that Olympus wants a mini-revolution to take place – one where the Pen is central to the big move to a smaller world, a world where finally Four-Thirds has a way to shine the brightest.
IL-R) The Olympus E-P1 in chrome/black and white/beige variants © Copyright Olympus Imaging Corporation 2009. All Rights Reserved.
So basically the E-P1 is a sub-member of the Four-Thirds family. Olympus calls it Micro Four-Thirds and the fundamental difference between the two standards is the flange back distance. By removing the entire reflex mirror box assembly, the whole lens can actually move deeper inside the camera body. But how did it all begin? And when did the idea germinate?
As far back as when the E-1 was freshly available, Olympus was already peppering its engineers serious questions about genuine downsizing. Almost seven years earlier, the idea of doing away with the mirror box and moving the flange back further inwards and therefore shortening the distance to the sensor was already mooted. And development commenced back then that eventually became Micro Four-Thirds.
While Micro Four-Thirds was being tested and developed, E-System engineers and designers were moving along the downsizing route at the same time although to the casual eye, that fact might appear tenuous. In this sense the real action wasn’t so visible at the top end with cameras like the E-3. Instead a lot of development was happening that gave the company models that spawned the 400-series as well as the E-510/520. While the 400-series provided some seriously compact sized DSLR models, much of the real work was done beneath the skin. And therefore while the Micro Four-Thirds was still ink on the blueprint, the company’s engineers were diligently proving that the concept was workable by conceptualising ideas that made their way into the company’s consumer-grade DSLR cameras; ideas that gave rise to smaller sensor-shift mechanisms for image stabilisation, more compact internal working parts, simpler integrated electronic assemblies, more powerful processors that could do the job of many and therefore do away with multiple chipsets. Even Olympus’ vaunted SSWF dust-reduction system was made smaller but its operability was further improved. The development background behind Micro Four-Thirds
Micro Four-Thirds official logo used during the initial announcement © Copyright Olympus Imaging Corporation 2008. All Rights Reserved.
The one most important attraction of a single-lens reflex camera is the ability to interchange and use different lenses. However the problem with this camera design is when the focal point position changes due to the different focal length (or field of view) of the lens in use. When that happens, it would not be possible to focus on the subject. Therefore to prevent this from happening, SLR camera designs specified that the focal point or imaging plane of all interchangeable lenses be fixed so that a permanent flange back length can then be specified. This meant that the distance from the mounting plane to the focal plane or sensor surface is to be determined and standardised.
When the industry went digital, another problem began to emerge. Unlike film SLR cameras, a typical DSLR has more components between the lens and the imaging sensor such as the sensor-shift assembly for image stabilisation, dust-reduction mechanism, anti-aliasing and near-IR filters and so on not to forget a mirror box to provide a properly inverted real view of the subject image viewable via an optical eyepiece. With all these to deal with, designers are hard pressed to find the necessary space to sufficiently distance the flange back from the sensor. And when that space is found, the average DSLR became thicker and the lenses necessarily longer.
IL-R) Comparing the current E-series DSLR and the E-P1 in terms of major internal system components © Copyright Olympus Imaging Corporation 2009. All Rights Reserved.
In contrast compact cameras don’t use mirror boxes and so they remain pocketable, simple in design and because of its absence, the flange back distance is also shorter and everything is keep small and manageable – something that up till now, interchangeable lens-cameras – DSLRs as we know them as – aren’t able to emulate. Therefore if a camera purports to offer the luxury of lens interchangeability but do so in a smaller package, then this flange back distance has to be shorter than it currently is. Logic then suggests that the mirror box must go.
(Above) The advent of LiveView and Live MOS sensor courtesy of Olympus’ 2006 E-330 © Copyright Olympus Imaging Corporation 2006. All Rights Reserved.
Which of course brings us to Olympus’ decision to introduce LiveView in 2006 via the E-330 – was this one example of something coming together fortuitously for the company? No, not really. LiveView was one of several little development milestones to further the development of the Micro Four-Thirds platform. Introducing it in the E-330 was just part of the overall stealth plan. LiveView isn’t just important for the larger Four-Thirds E-System but in the overall scheme of things, it is central to the propagation of Micro Four-Thirds. You could say that bringing LiveView to its DSLRs was a bit of a Trojan horse that caught the industry napping.
The E-330’s and subsequent refinements to LiveView were all important as Micro Four-Thirds began to slowly crystallise and amongst these was the critical development necessary to enable contrast-detection autofocusing to be acceptable. This took some time but once Olympus introduced Imager-AF with the E-520, both Olympus and Panasonic were ready to announce the emergence of the Micro Four-Thirds System.
There were still other bits of development to go through yet but essentially the important parts were all now in place. One of these was the SSWF dust reduction mechanism, so successfully deployed throughout the E-System DSLR models. In the E-P1, Olympus heavily revised its design, changing the filter from the normal circular to a rectangular shape and then in typical Maitani thinking, split the supersonic oscillator into two vertically-stacked sections so that its overall unit size could be reduced without affecting its performance and hence effectiveness.
And so when Olympus Imaging Corporation and Panasonic – represented by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd – jointly announced a new camera standard called Micro Four-Thirds on August 5 2008 in Tokyo, the shock registered throughout the industry was palpable – no one had expected this at all.
As the press release then had stated, Micro Four-Thirds would achieve a significantly smaller form factor for interchangeable lens camera design through the following distinguishing characteristics:
- Almost 50% shorter flange back distance (measured from the lens mount to the sensor)
- 6mm smaller outer diameter of the lens mount (compared to Four-Thirds)
- An increase in electrical contacts in the lens mount from 9 to 11 to host ‘additional’ functions
Apart from the shorter flange back distance, the smaller lens mount also contributed to the resulting lens size reduction, which was necessary to help convey the overall compactness of the new platform. The new lens mount is now about 6mm smaller and at this size, Micro Four-Thirds will transmit the same optical flux to the Four-Thirds System while at the same time retaining the required strength.
The third distinguishing factor is the gain of two additional electrical contacts in the lens mount. Compared to Four-Thirds DSLRs, cameras like the E-P1 will make use of these two contacts to enjoy smoother LiveView shooting with significantly shorter time lags, meaning that there will be no sluggish shutter responses. At a reported 0.7ms, that’s pretty good. Communication between an M.Zuiko lens and the Micro Four-Thirds body will be speedier courtesy also of a new high-speed I/O processing technology developed for HD video recording. Another important development cornerstone of Micro Four-Thirds is software-based lens distortion correction, which promises to deliver remarkable improvements despite a shortened flange back distance. |
