So Panasonic has announced their Micro 4/3rds camera. It is a cute and tiny SLR-shaped camera, not the rangefinder some of us were hoping for....

With the colors and other such features, the word on the Internet is that it's aimed at the female audience. I don't think it'll really make sense until the 20mm f/1.7 lens comes out, assuming that it's a pancake lens. Also, it won't autofocus with standard 4/3rds lenses nor does it do video.

This is useful. The G1 looks like it might be reasonably able to fit in the pocket with the 20mm f/1.7 lens. I think that whenever they decide that American consumers can handle a smaller camera, the camera they produce will be the sort of thing I want.

The Panasonic LX1 interested me, a long time ago, but never enough to get one. The new LX3 looks cool, assuming that there aren't any big stupid design errors lurking.

The lens goes out to f/2.0 and they brazenly decided to NOT add more pixels to the same size sensor as the LX2 had, instead making the sensor a smidgen bigger but at about the same resolution. Plus there's a flash hotshoe.

It's looking like the market for cool compact cameras for people with high end SLR cameras is heating up.

One of the central arguments of the 4/3rds mount was that digital camera sensors were destined to stay small, thus, a new mount for these smaller sensors, with a smaller lens throat and registration distance so that the lenses could be smaller and lighter, only covering that 4/3rds mount size. Of course, Olympus kinda screwed it up.

There's been some hope that we're going to stop seeing the fairly stupid megapixel race progress and might actually see some new features in cameras. As usual, it didn't happen this PMA.

Because I view my "primary" cameras as being best carried as clusters of heavy but high-quality hardware, I've realized that I'm really a Serious Compact junkie without realizing it.

I've been keeping my eye on these three cameras, given that one of the three is my current option when my G7 dies. Although I'm also holding out hope for a bigger sensor serious compact.