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Page 4 of 5 Bringing forward tomorrow When Saul heard of David’s decision to fight Goliath even as others simply melted away from the challenge, he offered his royal armour for safety and protection, not realising that the young boy from the valley of Elah had no need for such. In dispensing with the armour, David set forth to face the giant whose shadow alone was enough to consume him. As Olympus often discovered in the past, popularity doesn’t go well with being different. The unloved – but brilliantly executed – E-300 comes to mind and as unfairly treated as it were, the market thumbed it down as being too different. The price to pay is often costly. Over the years, Olympus toned down its maverick nature and competed on ‘level’ terms but Micro FourThirds breathed new life into its innovative nature, returning the company to its typical innovativeness. Even as the victor writes the rules, Micro FourThirds buckled the trend with its mirror-less design, proving that it is possible to be savvy and successful at the same time. Armed with early success, Olympus and Panasonic saw opportunities to move away from convention and delivered solutions that proved that compactness did not come with compromises on creativity and functionality. Now that this argument is settled, Micro FourThirds could move in with the next technology blow and this time, Olympus saw a ripe chance to revolutionise the shutter design. 
For more than a century, camera shutters have always had leaves, blades and then curtains. Curtain-wise, camera makers have made them operate horizontally at first before moving wholesale to vertical in order to extract higher shutter speeds. Micro FourThirds is about to rendered all these obsolete with new technology around the corner that will revolutionise camera design in the most profound fashion.
© 2008 Olympus Imaging Corporation From an innovation standpoint, the camera shutter is the least evolved. Its design had hardly changed despite the camera being more than a hundred years old now. If Micro FourThirds has its way, we will see an unprecedented design that will shake the industry. Imagine for a moment the ability to utilise, in a single instant, multiple shutter speeds across the same image frame, and simultaneously, produce variable effects of and on the subject, the foreground and background. Imagine further that when you do that, you can now perfectly prevent the highlights from getting blown out while you retain all the details in the shadowed areas – all these because you can designate the shutter to vary its exposure speed across the different areas of the image frame. If you can grasp all these, you’d understand the significance of what is to come. And soon. The repercussions of such a new technology cannot be underestimated. If TTL Flash Metering turned the whole industry upside down during the mid-Seventies, this innovation will divide the market into those that can and those that can’t. And in the process, this may well unmask the new millennium’s unequivocal leaders of the camera industry. Another attractive dividend of such a shutter design is that there is no noise. Without the physical mirror and shutter causing movements, a future Micro FourThirds camera sheds off the last vestige of mechanisation, introducing a new era of noiselessness the likes of which the industry has never experienced. Because there’s a chance that some users might find it hard to confirm an exposure (without the usual noise to confirm), expect Panasonic and Olympus to introduce cameras where you can select your own volume-adjustable shutter tone option. It is not difficult to imagine how this alone might drive at least some fans and users of the Leica M to Micro FourThirds no more than you’d expect Olympus to graft this technology into their future FourThirds DSLR cameras. Indeed if FourThirds itself is looking for the right Holy Grail, this one might just be the ticket. Size is everything or so they claim “Am I a dog that you come to fight me with a stick? I will feed your carcass to the sheep!” For bible readers, Goliath’s curse of David resonates very memorably. It speaks of blind arrogance and ignorance of an unseen power. The world seems hell bent on size. Big luxurious cars. Big complex looking watches. Big palatial mansions. Big highrise hotels. Now big cameras. Big seems to translate quality, purpose and performance. Big affords bragging rights, the likes of which are incomparable in the public – a wedding photographer lugging a huge camera around his neck is bound to attract more attention than one carrying a Leica M9 in his hands. Micro FourThirds perhaps poses the biggest challenge to that precept but in similar ways to how 35mm displaced medium-format as the choice of the masses. After all it’s a classic confrontation based on the same battle drawn lines. Medium-format, much like large DSLR, cameras was the mainstay. They define the only means by which users identify quality. 35mm entered the fray and was derided for its smaller size. The industry believed it wouldn’t work because the format couldn’t translate into quality people are accustomed to. But 35mm compelled the market to look at quality in a different light by establishing priorities other than imagery but also in other areas such as size (portability), bulk (convenience), weight (burden) and functionality (features). As more camera manufacturers jumped on to the bandwagon, technological development swung the way of 35mm. Slowly but surely medium-format began losing its lustre and found itself in a corner on its own where it developed a higher ground for commercial photography. By then all was lost and a number of manufacturers went out of business. Some closed their medium-format business and concentrated on 35mm. Others tried to mix the two together but often with mixed results. All in all, 35mm was disruptive enough to shake the industry and ushered in an unprecedented change in the market where consumers saw the worth of priorities other than just image quality. Micro FourThirds is in the best position to rewrite history in almost the same way. The ominous signs are that the mid-to-lower spectrum of DSLR cameras will be impacted to some degree. The bottommost rung will likely suffer the most as more Micro FourThirds – and similar format – cameras begin to flood the market. 
(L-R) Canon EOS 1D Mark IV, Olympus Pen E-PL1 (red), Olympus Pen E-P2 (black) with VF-2. All have HD movie recording abilities but look at the size differences though. Image courtesy of Canon Corporation and Olympus Imaging Corporation Note: Images are not to exact scale and are only meant for a rough visual comparison The market segments most influenced by Micro FourThirds are those looking for something better than digital compacts but unwilling to carry loads of equipment. These can be amateur users as well as working photographers who prefer a simpler carry-all for times when lugging work equipment isn’t best. These user segments are quite enormous in size. For those who have often complained of heavy camera bags, Micro FourThirds is their best answer to date. And from the looks of it, many have bought into the idea already and more will follow.
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