Olympus has just announced their new camera, the E-P1:

Olympus - E-P1 (http://www.olympus.co.uk/consumer/21693_pen-camera_e-p1_21723.htm)
Olympus E-P1 'digital Pen' - in depth preview + samples: Digital Photography Review (http://www.dpreview.com/news/0906/09061601olympusep1.asp)

It looks a nice camera, and has a 1280 x 720 HD mode.

But...

IT'S ONLY 30 FPS WHICH MAKES IT USELESS FOR EU FILM MAKERS!!!

I'm guessing Panasonic will release a similar camera in the near future (September?) that will do 24p. I can see them branding it Lumix.

well they already have the GH1 that just came out, it's based on the same micro 4/3's standard that panasonic and olympus coined together.

I guarantee that Panasonic will do a more compact M43 camera at some point, probably sooner rather than later. Samsung will as well. The form factor introduced with the E-P1 will become a highly competitive area of the market. The "pro" compact market is already huge.

I'm still surprised that the E-P1 has not generated more discussion here...

Just wondered if this is the same bite rate as the Pentax K7?

Dpreview now has moviesamples:

Olympus E-P1 Hands-on Preview: 14. Movie Samples Gallery: Digital Photography Review (http://www.dpreview.com/previews/olympusep1/page14.asp)


And a sample on Vimeo:
http://vimeo.com/5229891

I'm still surprised that the E-P1 has not generated more discussion here...

Me too. It doesn't seem to have sparked much of a response on the motion side, but there is a lot of talk about it on photography sites. I'm hoping to get one over the summer, mostly for stills, but also to shoot occasional footage. Manual control is a bit of a grey area at the moment. It appears that whilst control in AP mode works, full manual is not a given. Most of the daylight footage I've seen is quite stroby, so I'm presuming most was shot in AP mode.

Some of the dpreview samples are worth downloading. The IQ for a relatively small camera is pretty amazing really.

Whoaa. Big time rolling shutter. Here's a screen shot from the video posted at dpreview.

Note the brick building on the left side of the image. The illusion of a warped wall is due to the faster moving foreground vs the slower moving background. Accountable only through severe rolling shutter.

Note that this shot was taken from a relatively fast moving train with the background moving from right to left.

Makes me wish for the ccd's back.... decent footage though...

I posted it on the Area 51 section before Olympus officially announced the specs and somehow the post magically disappeared.

The biggest problem Olympus is going to have with this camera is keeping it in stock especially in the US. Panasonic’s LX3 has been hard to find at a good price for nearly a year now and it looks like the same thing is happening to the ZS3, GH1 cameras and their TM300/HM300 camcorders. Even Sanyo’s HD2000 is hard to get. It’s as if these companies are afraid to enter the US market right away with their top products. Why don’t Olympus be a rebel and release this thing in the U.S first?

IT'S ONLY 30 FPS WHICH MAKES IT USELESS FOR EU FILM MAKERS!!!
Well since it’s 30.0003 (according to VLC Player), it’ll even be slightly problematic to the NTSC regions who would much rather have 29.97. The least they could have done was use straight 30p just like the 5D Mark II and even that’s somewhat problematic for some type of editing situations.

I would still be extremely happy to own one of these regardless.

It’s more expansive than Leica’s D LUX 4 but the value is significantly better. They need an answer to the E-P1 very quickly.