Thursday, May 3, 2012

Two Readings on Camera Design

It’s been a good week for discussing camera design on the Internet. Mike Johnston posted “The Best-Looking Cameras” on Tuesday, and Richard Sexton’s essay, “A Critique of Camera Design,” went up on Luminous Landscape today. I particularly like Sexton’s brief comments on the Pentax K-01, a camera I’d like to write about soon.

Perhaps Sexton is a bit too hard on the Olympus OM-D E-M5, which is not the first and only mirrorless camera with a pseudo-pentaprism. The Panasonic G and GH series have had them for years, except they adopted the contemporary projecting poppy-uppy flash style of prism. More recently, the Nikon V1 did the same thing, though with a less derivative profile.

Low points are limited to yet another tiresome prediction of Micro 4/3’s demise and an incorrect statement of the sensor size of the Canon G1X...in the same paragraph. The G1X* doesn’t have an APS-C sensor; it’s minimally larger than 4/3. SRSLY.

* No, I am not going to pretend that I get the Canon G1X and the Panasonic GX1 confused. =P