Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Olympus Announces New PEN Cameras, XZ-2 Point-and-Shoot

Olympus has updated two of its popular Micro Four Thirds PEN cameras—replacing the E-PL3 $599.00 at Buydig.com with the E-PL5 PEN Lite and the E-PM1 $399.99 at TigerDirect.com with the E-PM2 PEN Mini. Both cameras feature the same 16-megapixel image sensor and processing engine as the OM-D E-M5 $1,279.99 at PRIMOTRONIX and touchscreen rear displays, making it possible to adjust settings, select a focus point, and fire the shutter with the touch of your finger. The top-end PEN camera, the E-P3 is not being upgraded at this point, but it does remain in the lineup.

Like its predecessor, the E-PM2 features a fixed rear 460k-dot LCD. The E-PL5 has a tilting screen with the same resolution and an improved tilt range—it can now face all the way front for self portraits, just like the display on the Sony Alpha NEX-F3 $498.00 at Dell. Sony's compact full-frame RX1 camera launches in November for $2,800.Both shoot at 8 frames per second with locked focus, but slow to 3.5 frames per second. Neither camera has built-in Wi-Fi, but they do support wireless transfer to an Android or iOS smartphone or tablet via the PenPal $48.95 at Amazon Marketplace Bluetooth adapter, Eye-Fi memory cards, and Toshiba FlashAir memory cards.

There are also a few new lenses coming for the Micro Four Thirds system. The most intriguing is a 15mm f/8 lens that Olympus is billing as a bodycap lens—at only 0.3 inches in depth, it's even slimmer than a pancake design. Even though it has a very modest maximum aperture, the manual focus lens barely protrudes from the camera body. It produces a 30mm field of view in terms of full-frame photography and can focus as close as 0.3 meters.

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