Serious Compacts: Pentax Q, Nikon, and the E-P3 that's on the way...

I find the Pentax Q interesting from a historical perspective. See, a long long time ago, Pentax made a really nice SLR system oriented towards the 110 film format. If you don't remember 110 film, it was one of the many attempts from Kodak to market more consumer-friendly film formats that just looked silly compared to any of the perfectly good 35mm cameras ranging from point-and-shoot to decent sized SLR.

Allegedly, the biggest problem with 110 film was merely that nobody made good 110 cameras, except for the Pentax system. With the Minox cameras and other similar quality micro cameras, you would get excellent image quality until the pictures disappeared into the grain. With the tiny frame size, you can make a fast lens with very few aberrations and it'll be small and have a wide depth of field.

I think the Q will be a decent seller amongst a certain set. You can kinda feel out the likely fanbase by the presence of toy lenses in the initial lineup. But I'm not too excited... it's still fairly expensive for the image quality and is fairly large. After all, the sensor is the size of a digital P&S camera.

There are some rumors that Nikon has a new EVF mirrorless system in development, somewhere between digital P&S and Micro 4/3rds. I think this actually is a decent compromise, depending on the implementation details. I'd been thinking for a long long time that something along the lines of a 1" sensor could be wicked hot... especially if they get all of the subtle details right.

Really, it has the potential to work out better than the Pentax Q, giving you the same super-tiny chassis, but better image quality.

Now, my G7 has been getting fairly long in the tooth. And I've been watching what the camera industry to decide what the 'if you put a gun to my head and told me to replace it' camera was going to be. There have been several new G-series cameras out since then, but after Olympus started shrinking the size of their SLRs, making pancake lenses, and talking about the micro-4/3rds system in 2008, I'd started to wonder if that was a better option for my needs.

I should also note that, since I got the G7, I've been doing progressively more ambitious bike rides and hikes to interesting locations, which tends to mean that a camera offering superior image quality in a tiny package continues to be important.

I think one of the smartest things that Olympus and Panasonic did when they released the Micro 4/3rds lineup was work on pancake lenses. It's a fair compromise. Part of the missed opportunity of the old 4/3rds system was that the lens mount was too highly optimized towards allowing the use of old OM-series lenses and prevented Olympus and Pentax from making a truly small SLR. The Micro 4/3rds mount is smaller, plus the modern deconvolution and high-ISO noise reduction mean that the loss of light gathering capability and small amount of optical aberrations are not quite as big of a problem as before.

The other nice thing about both the 4/3rds and Micro-4/3rds mount is that it's one of the few lens mounts that can take a Canon FD lens. I've got a bunch of them and, while it's not optimal, it's great for a lot of edge cases where I can take the time to work around the quirks of the setup. In fact, they even make adapters that take advantage of the larger image circle available.

The big problem I had with most of the earlier Micro-4/3rds cameras is that they weren't really 'done'. Only 1280x720 video. Not quite refined enough. Things like that.

I think the E-P3 is about at the point where they've fixed most of the obvious quirks. And it has clearly achieved a good amount of market share. I wasn't totally keen on the flash-less cameras and even less keen on the flash-and-shoe-less cameras, so having a tiny built-in flash that I can use to trigger external flashes is nice. And I prefer having IS in the body. And the UI looks to be fairly reasonable and high-end-oriented, using both knobs and the touch-screen.

So I've got one ordered, along with a Canon FD adapter. I'm a bit nervous because it's the first time I've really purchased a proper 'system' camera that's new. In fact, it's the most I've spent on a piece of camera gear ever.

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I should note that I've been using Amazon Prime for far too long. The same goes for my coworkers. See, I introduced one of my coworkers to Perky Jerky caffeinated jerky. And he one-click-ordered it on Amazon and discovered that it wasn't prime-eligible when it didn't show up in two days, so he was stuck in a few extra days of performance meat product lust.

And it's the same for me. See, the E-P3 is just making it's way through the pipeline out to the first purchasers. Of course, there are some people who are trying to sell them for several hundred dollars above list on Amazon, which is a bit sketchy..

Either way, I was hoping that I'd get it by last Friday when, instead, I'm getting it on Monday. Which means I don't get a weekend to play with my new toy.