Skip Williams wrote:
> ... But the same thinking has been applied to many photographic and
electronic formats over the past 20-30 years.
Think longer time period, Skip. More like 90 years. Leitz developed
their first 35mm in 1914 using 35mm movie film which had already been
around for awhile as movie film.
How many people said that 35mm film would never replace MF or LF.
"My god, you've got several times the area on MF/4x5 vs. 35mm.
There's not way that that little-bitty film will compete." Of
course, we found out that as film technology improved, for the vast
majority of cases, the 35mm format was more than good enough. The
flexibility and advantages offered by the smaller format outweighed
the advantages of the larger negatives.
But there do appear to be limits. No film format smaller than 35mm has
survived for long. If we take APS as an example we find that it had
some usability advantages but most of the advantage was lower cost to
Kodak and higher cost to the consumer with lower quality to boot.
35mm, on the other hand, did make lower quality images than the MF and
LF cameras but it was good enough for most things AND (key points) the
cameras and processing were dramatically smaller, lighter and cheaper.
In the case of the E-1 Olympus has produced a beautifully designed
camera. Its images are slightly smaller and noisier than its
competition but certainly adequate or better. Unfortunately, Olympus
has not delivered on smaller, lighter and cheaper; quite to the
contrary. Neither has it delivered yet on the promise of rescuing the
digital world from the wide angle bug-a-boo. I would have thought that
one of the first lenses out of the gate would have been a 9mm or
something akin to the Zuiko 18/3.5. This to demonstrate that their
design philosophy for the 4/3 system was correct. Instead there is no
such lens and we continue to see ordinary SLR lens designs performing
quite well on full-frame sensors.
Of course, 4/3 might still win if full frame sensors always remain too
expensive such that 4/3 is the only cost effective way to achieve a wide
angle. And, just as a 4/3 sensor is always destined to be noisier than
equivalent technology in a larger sensor, a larger sensor is always
destined to cost more than the 4/3 sensor. But, just like Kodak with
APS, Olympus seems intent on delivering the cost benefits to themselves
instead of the customers. 4/3 might be just as short lived as APS.
Chuck Norcutt
Woburn, Massachusett, USA
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