Olympus Statement About Fourthirds and Micro Fourthirds

Started Jan 31, 2013 | Discussions thread
Great Bustard
Forum ProPosts: 24,681
Yes/No question follows:
In reply to boggis the cat, Feb 4, 2013

boggis the cat wrote:

Great Bustard wrote:

GBC wrote:

I think there were "evasive" because they had different streams of development, and they didn't know what would succeed technology wise.
I am sure they tried their hardest to implement 43rds lenses on micro bodies with good AF, but kept an E7 development stream to be a fail-safe.
Who knows until the specs get leaked 2 weeks before release.

...simply putting the EM5 sensor and IBIS into an E5 body and calling it an E7 would have done wonders, yet so many make it out as an impossibly difficult and expensive task.

Well, then you have people complaining about it being exactly that -- some E-M5 parts stuck into the E-5 / E-3.

Recall the arguments about what improvements were present in the E-5 (particularly the argument over 'moire' vs. resolution) then extrapolate to an 'E-7' with the updated sensor and IBIS only, at US$1700.

People (quite reasonably) expect a 'flagship' model to offer more than less expensive models. Terada also seems to be indicating that they are working on improving AF performance:


And, of course, they will likely re-use the E-M5 sensor with whatever processing improvements they have figured out in the interim:


The E-x line needs to differentiate itself a bit more to make standard FourThirds cover a different photography usage area. If they can put a really good C-AF system in place, then that coupled with their high-performance long telephoto zooms becomes a credible system again for wildlife shooters. The E-M5 sensor loses little if anything to the current APS-C variants, so the AF performance seems the remaining weakness.

If an E7 were released that were nothing more than the EM5 sensor and IBIS in the E5 body, would it be a profitable product?

My answer:  Yes, yes it would.  Would it sell even better with improved C-AF?  Absolutely, and I see no reason that improved C-AF could not be thrown in as well -- it's not like they haven't had time to improve on that (albeit they may have put no effort in that direction, concentrating on mFT instead).

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