New Micro Four Thirds models

The Micro four thirds cameras were launched by Olympus and Panasonic about three years ago. A quick recap: SLR cameras have large sensors and pixels and therefore low noise. They also have a "mirror in the loop" that allows the viewfinder to show *exactly* what is going to be photographed. This is done by beamsplitting the incoming light into two paths, one of which goes to the sensor and the other to the viewfinder. These two features force SLR cameras to have a large form factor.

The Micro four thirds system basically tries to be a "pocket SLR" by reducing the sensor size (but not by much) and removing the mirror in the viewing path. It also tries to give the consumer an "SLR feel" by having removable and interchangeable lenses. The nytimes has a nice article about the new cameras, and the sizes are 4.4x2.7x1.3 inches.

This blog always likes to see if innovations meant for the marketplace have an impact on research. I'm not seeing any particular feature of these cameras that we could use in research, since neither the small sizes nor the high quality of images are a game-changer. However, you can think of these cameras as a poor man's SLR. Perhaps we could exploit the cheapness factor in some areas of appearance capture, where many cameras are used...are there applications that need 100s of SLR-like cameras?

A note about image noise and sensor resolution. Large pixel sizes collect more light, so its obvious that this would increase SNR. However, when you purchase a camera, you rarely find two candidate cameras with the same resolution, but one with larger pixel sizes: that would be an easy choice. Instead, you may find one camera with a large sensor and small pixels, while another has a smaller sensor but with larger pixels. Each individual pixel in the second camera should have higher SNR, but the overall sensor size of the first one is larger, and that does have some benefit.

There are sites that explain these relationships in detail. I just want to point out that the right decision is not obvious since resolution and SNR get mixed up when you compare across both those quantities.