And so I missed all the news of new cameras or promised ones being ready to buy. Having used micro 4/3rds cameras on holiday I’m going to stick to a little discourse on these (hereafter known as MFT) or similar entrants which are now I see described by the appropriate label of EVIL for Electronic Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens.

So we have  Samsung’s NX10 and Olympus’s E-P2 ready for sale. The Olympus E-PL1 announced and ready for sale at least in the UK, The Panasonic G2 and G10 announced and not available until midsummer. Is it worth buying any of these?

I think I’m going to be brutal about the first two.

When the Samsung NX10 was announced it was expected to support a great many adapters for other lenses and in particular the Leica M mount. To be able to do this with a larger sensor than MFT would have been important. But it won’t work. Everyone except Samsung has said that and from the maths  it looks likely that everyone is correct. So we have what looks like a nice little camera with some OK lenses initially and promise of more plus compatibility with Pentax and Nikon lenses in manual focus. To be honest, what makes it better or more desirable than a Canon 1000D that’s a lot cheaper and has a huge number of lenses available for it? There’s lots others better too – Pentax K7 for example. Samsung can keep it relatively cheap and it will find buyers but there’s no way I could say now, as I did before, that MFT builders should worry.

I have an Olympus E-P1. I bought it when it was first available. The design is lovely, it produces clean and desirable jpegs out of the box, it has a cleverly designed live view navigable menu, it also has great things like horizontal and vertical level indicators, in camera vibration control, good stereo movies and it’s a MFT camera. BUT it has no viewfinder, no flash and it’s a pain to use with manual focus lenses. So E-P2 addresses the viewfinder but at a very high cost for as good a viewfinder as it in the Panasonic G1, still no flash and as much of a pain for manual lenses as its predecessor. Sorry Olympus, not something I would buy.

Now we can look at the Panasonic G2 to be ready for sale in June 2010. The G1 is a really good camera but it does not have a video option because that would have clashed with the GH1. So the G2 has the video option that the GF1 has. The G2 has the same articulated screen as the G1, a really useful option. The G2 screen is touch-sensitive like the iPhone etc. Clever? I’m not sure, but there will be people that like it. And then there will be more clever Panasonic stuff – and it is clever. If you want an articulated screen then once the G1 is no longer available then the G2 will be the only MFT option for a bit. If you don’t want the articulated screen then the cut-down G10 could be for you or the better option, the GF1 will likely still be available at a competitive price. From preliminary information the G2 would appear to come with a new and less appealing 14-42mm lens as will the G10.

So to the Olympus E-PL1 just now available for sale in the UK. This does look interesting. It’s a less-well-featured E-P1 in a smaller body. It can take the electronic viewfinder but I doubt that many will pay the price for it. This is a plastic-bodied camera with compact camera style controls and a MFT sensor. Congratulations Olympus. You got it right! It actually has most of the manual control of the E-P predecessors, lacking enough to put it in a lower price bracket. No control wheels but the usual arrangement of buttons to change shooting parameters. No problem for people trading up. It also has a flash! I think this is the first viable option for people with compact cameras to upgrade to an interchangeable lens system. While I don’t think that people will do that in vast numbers, I’m sure that it will be attractive enough to keep the concept running and if I didn’t already have a Panasonic GF1 this Olympus E-PL1 could be a very attractive option.

My mind immediately jumped back to 1972. This was the year that the true pocket calculator was  born, in the UK of course, and it was the brainchild of the somewhat maverick Clive Sinclair and his partner Chris Curry.

The very first example of this simple machine cost the amazing sum of £90 and was sold in London in shops like Harrods and Dunhills. It had the usual four functions plus a memory store and recall. It was made from curiously bendy black plastic and ran off four mercury cells (I think they were 1.3 volt 400  cells but they could have been 675s) that did not last very long. The buttons were little press-studs and did not always register when they were pressed. The calculator was reasonably accurate, certainly a lot more accurate than Bill Gates’s first Basic interpreter, and having a little calculating machine that was at least accurate to two decimal places was wonderful for those of us who had relied on slide-rules or very tedious hand worked long multiplication and division. But honestly, despite its novelty and interesting use of pulsed power, it wasn’t something to rely on totally. Two years later the first reasonably sized Hewlett Packard financial calculator (£475 as I remember) was  the thing to have. Around 1976, Sinclair produced a far better pocket calculator, the Sovereign, that was a design classic and I think a mere £40. But that was around the time when a 16 kilobyte memory upgrade for the Apple II cost £150 so it was comparatively cheap.

I don’t often take trips down “memory lane” but the thought of being able to buy 90 calculators for the price of the first one I had (without allowing for the effect of inflation) rather amused me.

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The Story itself is the same size as novels were before they grew to 400 pages and had to be made taller and wider. That is 8 inches high by 5 inches wide  and just under three-eighths of an inch deep in nicely sculpted creamy plastic. The screen is 6 inches in diagonal measurement which is quite a good size and you can set the text to be in portrait or landscape aspect (portrait is better). Below the screen is a qwerty keyboard that’s quite easy to use and also contains all the controls necessary to operate it. There is a standard 2 gigabytes of flash memory and a slot for a SD or SDHC card up to 32 gigabytes. That’s a lot of storage. You won’t need it all.

Before I go any further I should say that when my Story arrived (late January 2010) it had firmware 1.02 and appeared to be a little, um, “unfinished”. Looking at the iriver website and clicking International and then Support and then Download took me to a list of firmware updates in which was version 1.50 for the Story. Following download (44 megabytes or so) I extracted a file “ebook.hex” to the root folder of my SDHC card and having turned the Story off then inserted the SD card, turned the Story on and it updated the firmware to version 1.61. Now it’s not everyone that would know to do that and particularly not everyone buying a gizmo to read books with. And there were no instructions on how to actually update the firmware. With this new firmware things have improved dramatically. One can now resize text, reflow it, zoom reflowed text, use Windows fonts for user-generated text and all sorts of things that should have been in the original product. But this is audio-visual land where products are like this; at least iriver does update its firmware – I threw my Archos 605 in the bin as it never did work properly.

So, provided you have firmware 1.50 or whatever the latest is, you have a very competent e-reader that does rely on a computer for its e-books. The Story supports epub, pdf, rtf, doc and text files as well as being able to display xls spreadsheets and (supposedly) Powerpoint files. It will display jpeg, gif and bmp images (but don’t try large ones) and can play music files of the wma, mp3 and ogg varieties. In fact it is rather a good music player. You can also use it as a voice recorder (but the one in your phone if you have one is better) and there is a diary that doesn’t synchronise with anything and is therefore pretty useless.

There are some things that are not that wonderful. While it’s very easy to transfer ebooks to the Story using Adobe Digital Editions (it’s just drag ‘n drop) they end up in the Story with the spaces in the title converted to underscores which is ugly. The indexing of book titles ignores (probably quite correctly) the words A and The which irritates me. While the music player will read all WMA files perfectly it has problems with some MP3 ones. Its battery charges by being plugged into the computer using the supplied USB cable in “charging” mode so if you don’t have a USB port handy you could be stuffed for charging the battery unless you have a power supply that outputs 5v 1000 mA (cheap enough to buy but not supplied). I think basically that the criticism is that here is a piece of non-geek kit that needs a bit of geek mentality to live with it.

What it is good for is storing books to take to read on holiday or when travelling or even when the book is 600 pages and too heavy to hold for long. The Story doesn’t weigh much, it’s easy to use, the battery will last probably at least a week without a recharge. I’ve enjoyed reading with it and I’m sure it will pay for itself one way or another.

Remote switches are either wired or wireless. There are infra-red switches but don’t get one. The wired ones from the manufacturers have fairly short cables, allow a half-press or full-press of the shutter button and can lock the shutter open. These can cost up to £55 but if you shop around you can find good copies for between £5 and £10 with up to 5 metres of cable. The wireless ones do the same thing but with a transmitter and receiver with a working distance of up to 50 metres. The receiver that plugs into the camera can be used as a wired release if required and the transmitter works  just as a wired release. Manufacturer’s branded ones can cost an unbelievable £100 but excellent generic ones can be obtained for £20 (with batteries).

The most recent digital SLRs that have built-in flash have flash transmitters to fire stand-alone compatible flashguns but if you are using studio flash you will need a wireless trigger with one or more receivers. A branded set of 1 transmitter and 1 receiver will cost you £190 but how about 1 transmitter and 3 receivers for £35? And for ordinary flashguns you can get standard plastic diffusers for less than a third of the cost of the branded ones.

I like battery grips for semi-pro equipment. These screw into the baseplate of the camera and provide for another battery and also give you a grip for holding the camera in portrait aspect, duplicating on the grip the controls that the thumb and forefinger use when the camera is held in landscape aspect. The extra weight provided by the battery grip makes the camera better balanced (at least, I think it does) and it makes taking portrait shots hassle-free. There’s no magic in these grips; they are made of polycarbonate with covering matching the camera and have electrical contacts. Yet the grip for the Canon 5D Mk II camera retails at £230 and the one for the Canon 7D retails at £190. Excellent copies can be bought for £72 and £80 respectively. I have one for my 5d Mk II (which actually cost only £57) and one for my FujiFilm S 5 Pro.

Finally, if you want to use lenses for a different camera mount on your camera you will need an adapter. The most popular cameras for using other lenses are Canon EOS, 4/3rds and micro 4/3rds. You are likely to be recommended Novoflex adapters. These are good quality and made in Germany but at between £105 to £149 are unnecessarily expensive. There’s nothing in an adapter of this type than machined brass and/or aluminium and they all exist to stand the lenses off the receiving mount so that they have the original distance from the mounting flange to the sensor (or rather film originally). For example, a Noveflex adapter to put a Leica M lens onto a micro 4/3rds camera is £129 but a good copy is only £40. The same prices apply to Leica screw lenses. For other lenses, such as Nikon, Pentax, Contax, Rollei, Leica R, M42, Praktica B and Adaptec it’s probably better to get an adapter for Canon Eos (typically £9) and then a single Canon EOS to micro 4/3rds adapter.

So, where do these cheaper products come from? Unsurprisingly mostly from China, but you don’t have to order from China as the products discussed (and more) are available in the UK and in nearly all cases postage is included in the price. Because it is so easy to set up this way, all the ones that I have discovered have eBay UK shops. The ones I have bought from are called PIXLAMB, photobits42, webshoptoU and YISHUMA gadget store.

I already had the first micro 4/3 camera, the Panasonic G1, when I was tempted to buy the E-P1. The G1 is an immensely usable little camera and I am entirely happy with the twin lens kit of 14-45 and 45-200 mm for travel. The G1 has the only really good electronic viewfinder I have experienced and the articulated LCD is a real bonus. As I think I’ve remarked elsewhere, the G1 is what the Panasonic FZ-50 should have been and it’s a fine holiday companion.

Like many photographers I’ve seen the micro 4/3 system as an opportunity to use good small prime lenses on a slim and pocketable body. As a collector of mechanical cameras I have some “Leica screw” lenses and as my current film camera is a Voigtlander Bessa I have some of Cosina’s excellent lenses for use with that. Given that micro 4/3 has a sensor smaller than full-frame 35 mm the field of view of these lenses on 4/3 is half the nominal, so a 25 mm lens has a field of view of 50 mm and so on. Therefore my 15, 21, 25, 35, 50 and even 75 mm lenses for the Bessa will cover the focal range 30-150 mm on 4/3 when used with an adapter.

Here is the problem in using these lenses with the E-P1. The LCD is not high enough quality to focus a manual lens accurately so you have to get a magnified view. The E-P1 provides this. In order to do this you first have to set the E-P1 Live View screen to Zoom View. This can take up to 7 presses of the Info button but it’s possible to limit the number to 2 presses. There’s no shortcut to this. Then you can press the OK button in the middle of the multifunction dial to enter magnified view (and turn the secondary dial if you want to change the magnification level). Now focus. If you then want to reframe the shot you have to press the OK button again to zoom back out. Then you can press the shutter button to take the shot. This performance is not acceptable in the context of perhaps needing to focus quickly for a street shot. Of course it’s possible to set the lens to the approximate hyperfocal distance or use the distance scale on the lens to set depth of field but either way this may result in having to use a small aperture which in turn will require a slower shutter speed.

The Panasonic GF1, with the optional viewfinder, has an easy and intuitive method of focusing manual lenses. With the camera to the eye you press the rear dial, this instantly magnifies the viewfinder’s view so you can quickly focus and then half-press the shutter button (which exits magnified mode) to reframe the shot if necessary and then fully press the shutter button. The camera does not leave the eye during this rapid process. Also holding the camera to the eye provides more stability than holding it like a compact camera so the requirement for stabilisation is lessened. If you don’t have the viewfinder for the GF1 to focus manually using the LCD is quite acceptable.

I have found other irritations with the E-P1 that reviewers have mentioned. The green light when the camera is turned on is annoying but a piece of sticking-plaster can conceal it. The way the info screens are designed is counter-intuitive. It’s all too easy to rub the multifunction dial so that it creates a setting that’s not required. I quite often find that this has set the wrong white balance or something  like that. And not having a flash is really irritating; no wonder Olympus is giving one away with the E-P1 at present. It annoys me that my little semi-automatic flash that I use on my Bessa won’t work properly on the E-P1; it works fine on the GF1.

Apart from the shortcomings mentioned, The E-P1 is a fine camera if you think of it as an oversized compact for daylight use when quick focusing is not required. It does produce good shots. I’ve tried to get my wife to take it on but she won’t because she likes her Canon A570 that has a good lens with IS, an optical viewfinder, flash and works with 2 AA lithium batteries.

The breakthrough is that this new Samsung is only a tiny bit larger than the Panasonic G1 but has the same sensor as the GX20 which is a 14 megapixel APS-C size – one and a half times the size of a micro 4/3 sensor. The NX10 has been introduced “SLR shaped” much as the G1 was by Panasonic and for the same reason (to establish it in traditional markets) but it looks capable of being released in the future in a format close to the Panasonic GF1 and the Olympus E-P2. The key to this is the new lens mount. The sensor’s diagonal measurement is 6.7 mm greater than a 4/3 sensor so the throat of the mount has to accommodate that increase but Samsung have been able to create a mount with a flange-back measurement of only 25.5 mm. This does mean new lenses. The NX10 is being launched with three: a 30 mm pancake, an 18-55 mm short telephoto and a 50-200 telephoto. More will, I think follow fairly rapidly and Samsung has confirmed that it will make available a Pentax K mount adapter and a Leica M mount adapter. As soon as the usual people make adapters for other lens mounts it will be possible to use very many earlier lenses with this new lens mount.

The launch price in the UK of the NX10 with the 18-55 mm lens is expected to be £599 though I guess that it will actually be a bit less. The Panasonic G1, announced 15 months ago now, can be had with the 14-45 mm lens for about £465 and although it has a nice articulated screen it does not have video, which the NX10 does, and has two fewer megapixels. The NX10 will be priced similarly to the Panasonic GF1 and the Olympus E-P1 but of course it has an electronic viewfinder whereas in their basic configurations the other two do not. And an upgrade to a viewfinder is expensive.

So here we have a new camera from a major electronics manufacturer that competes with (and probably will out-perform) the latest micro 4/3 cameras. I don’t think I’ll be getting one because I am quite happy with the micro 4/3 offering as it is at present and I already have an APS-C size sensor in my new Canon 7D. But think: It looks as though the micro 4/3 consortium needs a new sensor if its members are to compete with more pixels for increased definition plus lower noise for better large prints. I’m sure it will get one. But look at the Canon 7D and suppose that something close to approaching its sensor and processors were in the next generation of the NX range. That’s where the breakthrough could lead to.

Let’s look quickly as what it does that other compact cameras do, before looking at its special qualities. It has a simple movie mode, VGA 640 x 480 with mono sound but you can zoom during the movie clip. It has the usual fully automatic mode where you just point and it shoots. It has a sensor-shift anti-shake device that it combines with using a higher ISO speed to ensure that user-induced blur is kept to a minimum. It handles face-detection rather better than its competitors do. You get standard scene modes of Portrait (normal and enhanced), Landscape, Sport, Night shots (hand-held and tripod), Fireworks, Sunset, Snow, Beach, Party, Text and several flash modes. You can choose 4:3, 3:2 and 16:9 aspect ratios and Fuji’s Provia, Astia or Velvia film colour modes as well as monochrome and sepia. Metering is standard multi-segment, spot or average and focus is multi, centre or continuous (but no spot focus). The flash is well controlled in a range of 1 ft to nearly 14 ft at wide-angle and 3 ft to 8 ft at telephoto. The Macro mode is from 2 inches. It has minimal shutter-lag, can take 3 consecutive shots in just over a second and the battery will take an average of 230 pictures before it is exchausted. It doesn’t have any automatic bracketing functions, nor can you shoot in Raw mode. This is all standard stuff that nearly every compact digital camera should have. But the reason to buy the F70EXR is for the additional shooting modes and what you can do with them.

FujiFilm’s compact cameras are renowned for excellent control of digital noise. The F30 and F31 set the standard for clean pictures with their 6 megapixel sensor. The F70EXR has a 10 megapixel sensor that enables larger prints to be made at a high pixel density. Whereas the sensor on the F31 had a pixel density of 14 megapixels per square centimeter the density on the F70’s sensor is more than double at 33. This in principle means that the F70 will be noisier than the F31 and this is true but only to a small extent. In full 10 megapixel mode the F70EXR is good up to ISO 800 and acceptable at ISO 1600. To my eyes the F31 is as good at ISO 1600 as the F70 is at ISO 800 and this is a real achievement by the F70 given the 66% increase in pixels.

Like the F200EXR, the F70EXR can combine the data from adjacent pixels to produce smaller 5 megapixel files which when combined with multiple exposures will create pictures of great dynamic range or very low noise. There are four EXR modes. The first is High Resolution and uses the full 10  megapixels to create the most detail in the shot. The second is “D-Range” where the camera will increase the dynamic range of the shot so that there is more detail in shadows and no “blown” highlights. The user can determine the range from 100% to 800% or automatic. This produces a 5 megapixel medium resolution file. The third option is High Sensitivity/Low Noise where the resultant medium resolution file will produce less noise than a standard shot. Here I reckon that ISO-for-ISO the F70 beats the F31 but to be honest I think that the standard 10 megapixel shots are quite good enough. Finally EXR Auto Mode lets the camera choose which EXR mode to apply and whether to use any special Scene modes in addition. I’ve found that in this mode the camera may choose exactly the mode that I do not want, so I avoid it.

Apart from the EXR modes and the Auto mode, the F70 offers two Natural Light modes, three user-intervention modes and two special effect modes. The Natural Light modes are one where the flash is inhibited and the camera automatically selects an exposure biased for natural lighting and the “with flash” mode where the camera takes a picture using the natural lighting mode and one with fill-flash and saves both. This latter mode is very useful.

The three user-intervention modes are:

• Program where the camera chooses the aperture and the shutter speed and the user can alter the metering and white balance etc.
• Aperture priority mode where the user can choose one of two aperture settings which are approximately two stops apart. These settings will depend on the zoom setting and the lower one will be displayed initially. If the user chooses the higher aperture setting the camera will automatically alter the shutter speed so that the shot is properly metered. The “aperture” is actually altered by the camera choosing to apply or remove a 2-stop neutral density filter!
• Manual mode allows the choice of the aperture setting as above plus the choice of a shutter speed. A meter shows the relationship between under- and over-exposure but this is not reflected in the display on the LCD which is rather unnerving

Finally there are two “Pro” modes that are innovative and useful.

• Pro Focus mode transforms the shot into one in which the foreground interest (usually a person or group I would imagine) is in focus but the background is defocused as would be the case with a Single Lens Reflex camera using a wide-angle lens at a wide aperture . It’s achieved by taking three simultaneous images and merging them and beware that it does not work all the time as the composition has to be one where there is a clear foreground interest that is the focused part.
• Pro Low-Light mode takes four high ISO images and merges them to decrease noise levels. It does automatically what you can do manually with noise-management software by merging the de-noised image with the original detailed by noisy image. It works well but post-processing a standard image to remove noise can give a better result.

The combination of the excellent lens and the new sensor produces very detailed images in good light and the choice of the Fuji “film modes” can add saturation or “punch” or soften the image. Many other compact cameras offer some of the facilities that the F70EXR provides but at the time of writing no one camera provides such flexibility. And look at the price! Since I got it, and over the holiday and New Year celebrations I’ve been very pleased with the results.

In 2009 we had 23 interchangeable lens cameras launched. Three full 35 mm frame (Nikon D3s, Sony A850 and Leica M9), one APS-H (Canon 1D Mk IV), twelve APS-C (Nikon D3000, Nikon D300s, Nikon D5000, Canon 7D, Canon 500D, Pentax K-x, Pentax K7, Sony A550, Sony A500, Sony 380, SonyA 330, Sony A230), three FourThirds (Olympus E-600, Olympus E-450, Olympus E-620) and four micro 4/3 (Olympus E-P2, Olympus E-P1, Panasonic GF1, Panasonic GH1). Plus a large number of compacts including grown-up ones from Canon, Ricoh and Sigma and some “bridge” cameras with 12 to 15 times zoom lenses.

For this piece I’m going to ignore bridge cameras because I don’t think there is any innovation to come to this sector of the market. They are do-anything cameras and they fill a need. I’m also going to ignore compacts, probably because so many of them are so similar but single out Canon, Nikon, Panasonic, Ricoh and Sigma for distinctive cameras and in particular Nikon for making the first camera with a projector built into it and Canon for dropping the number of pixels for the G11 versus the G10. So this is about interchangeable lens cameras with sensors of micro 4/3 and larger.

Ever since Olympus introduced “live view” with the E-330 in January 2006 it was inevitable that DSLRs would be capable of making video clips. In my view this is actually the only reason for having a live view system (except perhaps for the ability to shoot tethered to a tablet or laptop computer in a studio) because autofocus in live view is slow and not entirely accurate all the time. However with a  moving picture absolutely precise focus is not a prime requirement and the ability to create very high quality video using excellent lenses and with the ability to extract stills from the video stream is excellent. I have two Canon cameras capable of high-definition video and use it often. The new 7D is better adapted for video than the earlier 5D Mk II so I would expect a firmware upgrade for that model (promised by Canon for 2010).

One of the difficulties associated with video production is the size of files. Even short clips are very large. 2 Gigabytes takes time to shift. Professionals need to send their work to their agency or employer rapidly and securely. I would therefore envisage most new pro-level cameras being fitted with enhanced wireless (wifi or mobile broadband) to stream encrypted data and this could involve the development of new codecs. Maybe we would see this at the end of 2010.

Returning to firmware upgrades, having seen that at least two manufacturers are extending the market life of at least one camera each by improvements and new facilities via firmware, I would expect such upgrades to be paid-for with an ad-hoc price depending on the value of the upgrade to the user. Personally I would be ready to pay for improvements that I want to take advantage of.

For 2010 I can see strides forward in firmware/software. Already there is a greater willingness of manufacturers to use software to process known unwanted attributes of some lenses. You can see this if you use a Raw converter than doesn’t use a particular camera or lens’s profile. Micro 4/3 lenses have their geometric distortions removed, Canon lenses will have their vignetting lightened if a custom parameter is checked and the lens is either in the database or identified by the user, colour casts which may occur with some Leica lenses are supposed to be eliminated if the lenses are properly coded, Canon has doubled up its DIGIC IV processors in the D7 to permit faster burst rates and improved noise handling.

So far, if my predictions are true, I would say YES we do, or should care because these are improvements and not things stimulated by competition. It’s the “me too” development that often contributes very little.

First up on the “me too” front will be micro 4/3. Expect models from Sony and anybody else who can get Sanyo to make one for their badge. So far there is only one sensor used in micro 4/3. This is the Panasonic one used by them and Olympus under a consortium agreement. But while FourThirds is a standard with members signed up to it, it’s my understanding that Micro 4/3 is only a mount with a published specification. To some extent, competition is a good thing because the micro 4/3 cameras are too expensive but I think that unless micro 4/3 becomes a controlled standard the benefits of managed updating will be lost. While not micro 4/3, as it will use an APS-C size sensor, the promised Samsung NX will stimulate competition in the smaller interchangeable lens camera sector and what we need is competition and not “me too-ism”.

At the risk of being shot or worse, I’ve never been able to appreciate the FourThirds standard. I do have an Olympus E-330 but I bought it for my camera collection not necessarily to use. It has an applaudable design that does not work very well. The articulated screen doesn’t articulate enough (though it’s better than not articulating at all) and the viewfinder is dim and difficult to use. Moreover though it is a small and attractive camera the lenses are vast in comparison. Later I bought an E-520 to use with some of my Olympus and Minolta manual lenses (with adapters) but couldn’t get on with it and sold it. Personally I can’t see the FourThirds system lasting for very long and I suspect that any attempt to populate a FourThirds sensor with more than 5.1 megapixels per square centimeter will be a disaster.

Which brings me to the one thing that I would not like to see in 2010 and that is needless pixel packing. Looking, courtesy of DPReview, at the megapixel per square centimeter numbers for those cameras listed at the beginning of this piece that were introduced in 2009 we have an average of 5.05 for FourThirds and micro4/3 (with the exception of the Olympus E-450 that is 4.1). I think that this is pushing the envelope unless there is some magic software in any camera that exceeds 5.1. I don’t have any problem with Olympus Master 2 providing good up-resolution software but I would hate to see it at the in-camera stage. The average of the APS-C cameras new in 2009 (excluding the Canon 7D) was 3.44, ranging from 2.7 for the Nikon D3000 to 4.5 for the Canon 500D and all these cameras have been well received. The Canon 7D scores 5.4 as a result of its 18 MP in a 1.6 crop sensor. Clever firmware and software have done the trick with the 7D but I would not like to see the trend continue and frankly 14 MP would have been enough for me to buy the 7D (which I did). It’s significant that the Nikons D3s and D700 score 1.4 with the D3x at 2.8, the Sony A850 at 2.9 and the older Canon 5D Mk II at 2.4. The numbers for these full-frame cameras are relative to each other and illustrate the excellent performance of all of them. Plainly there is an expectation of Nikon introducing a “Canon 5D Mk II killer” in 2010 but I’m not certain that this will happen.

But when we are talking of camera bodies that cost (in the UK) between £1,200 and over £4,000, a little nudge in quality here or a tighter price there isn’t going to shift anyone from one system to another. We have a very large investment in system lenses, flashguns etc – considerably more than the cost of a camera body – and we have an investment in the way the camera bodies work and the confidence that comes from long usage (though I did read recently of one lady pro photog who apparently has five Canon 5D Mk II bodies, one Canon 1Ds Mk III body and only four lenses!). It’s true that, as happened a year ago, a top pro for a UK newspaper moved from one of the “top two” to the other and with considerable press exposure it’s thought that the manufacturer who won was not exactly concerned about margins in fixing the overall price for the deal.

What I would really like to see in 2010 is photo gear manufacturers recognising that the market is growing in maturity and certainly, in the segment where I and those like me make our purchases, not going madly after winning a race that doesn’t really demand a victor.

Inside the case neatly packed in sleeves are the four sections of the pod. Two of these screw together to make the basic pod and the other two slip into the upper section to provide additional height and to hold the head. The head supplied is a ballhead with a single locking screw and onto the camera fixing is supplied a magnetic palm-rest for when no camera is attached. The fixing is a novel arrangement of magnetic discs with a locking bar. One disk is the lower part of the fixing and you fit a disc to the camera to be attached. Two of these are supplied – a less powerful magnet for lighter cameras and a very  powerful one for larger cameras. To fix the camera to the pod it is only necessary to let the discs snap together with magnetic force and clip the locking bar. This is very easy and a great deal less trouble than the quick release plates on standard pods.

The pod has a special feature in that the lower of the two sections of the basic pod opens up to form a stand that holds the pod upright. When this stand is not required, it folds into a tube and is secured by a velcro fixing. Thus you have a small tripod holding the pole upright if required. It does, though, require a fairly level base as if not and a heavy camera is attached the pod will be likely to fall over.

The lowest height of the pod is 112 cm (44 inches). This is is a very comfortable height for walking on the level but quite low for use with a camera. The maximum height is 162 cm (64 inches) which allows for use as a trekking pole for guiding down treacherous slopes and for tall people to use as a monopod. Using the bottom section as a tripod shortens the height by just over 11 cm (about 4.5 inches). The ballhead can be removed and replaced by a tilt and pan head if required but this really defeats the object of having a dual-purpose pole though of course a pan and tilt head does make panning much easier and people intending to use the pod for video might think of carrying an alternative head in a pocket.

I’ve yet to find a gallery or museum or other historic venue that will allow the use of a proper tripod unless by prior appointment and even then for a (usually large) fee. Sadly there aren’t that many places of this sort that will allow cameras in anyway, but those that do will not usually complain if the TrekPod’s legs are used in tripod mode. Certainly one of my favourite galleries, the Fondation Maeght in St Paul de Vence in France does not object.

The specification of the TrekPod provides guidance for how heavy a camera you can expect to use with it. I didn’t believe that it would support my Canon 5D Mark II with the battery grip and a Sigma 70-200 f2.8 lens attached. But it does.

To sum up, I like the TrekPod Pro very much. It is not as light as some monopods but on the other hand it is much stronger being made out of aluminium and not polycarbonate. It’s also possible to get cheaper pods than this – which costs about £115 in the UK – but there is not one with a usable tripod section for anything near this price. I very much like the magnetic attachment system. For use as a walking/trekking pole it has all the comfort attributes necessary.

Over the past few years there has been a substantial increase in users of non-Microsoft systems. While Windows still dominates the personal and small business market, the number of Mac users has swelled substantially and there are now many mature Linux distributions that compete with the Microsoft product. All the computers in my office now dual-boot Windows and Linux (the Ubuntu variety).

The milestone in the title is because the LAZARUS programming system, after 10 years in development, is about to come out of beta-testing and be released as a stable product. Lazarus is supplied with and  mated to the Free Pascal Compiler to produce for computers running operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X/Darwin, DOS, Windows Mobile and Pocket PC, OS/2, Netware and MorphOS what Borland Turbo Delphi does for Windows and of course it runs on Windows too. Lazarus and the Free Pascal Compiler are free to use. The licence granted by the developers also lets you sell software made with Lazarus without having to pay any licence fee.

It’s therefore possible to develop and compile software on a machine with a single operating system and then simply move the source code to another machine with a different operating system and instantly compile it with absolutely no changes required. Or you could use a single machine running two or more operating systems. The third option is that with Lazarus for Windows it is possible to “cross compile” for a target operating system. If you want to convert software to run on the Pocket PC, you can get a free Windows Mobile emulator to test it on. You can also get an iPhone emulator for the Mac. And all these options are cost-free.

I’ve been using beta-test Lazarus software for nearly two years and I’ve been able to move a lot of my own software over to Linux and Mac OS/X without a lot of difficulty and of course writing it from scratch means that the software is completely portable. This has stimulated me into making software that when released will be free of charge.

I realise that it’s a bit of an aberration to write this for a blog that’s largely to do with photography but I think that it is wonderful to have this product  brought to market in the way it has been and distributed without any payment being required.The developers, all of whom are volunteers, do the work in their free time for no payment. In reaching this milestone they have hugely benefited the software writing community and through this the users of software that will largely be available at no or very modest cost. I want to offer my congratulations and thanks to the two teams involved.