I’m in fairly creative mood tonight, as evidenced by one (now two) blog postings, the PHP coding I did earlier, and the upload of some 75 random pictures to Facebook. I guess that’s what happens when I avoid the work I really should be doing. (Blech, JavaScript.)

Anyways, a few days ago a coworker mentioned something to me about duck typing, and I again decided to shirk my responsibilities and experiment. The basic idea is to stand typing on its head and have an imperative system rather than declarative — as they say, “if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.”

Read more »

Well, perhaps not the second two, but the first for sure — Olympus and Panasonic have jointly announced the new Micro Four-Thirds format. Basically, they took a standard Four-Thirds sized sensor, shrunk the lens mount, removed some old mechanical fluff holdovers from the film days (mirror and prism), and left with a small, interchangeable lens camera design that seems poised to make us rethink our digital SLRs.

You may not remember or be familiar with the Sigma DP-1, announced way back in 2006 (though it didn’t make it to market until this year), but it met with considerable excitement and was heralded as the first pocketable camera with the image quality of a DSLR. That’s because the largest contributing factor to the difference in image quality between that monster hanging around your neck and the sleek compact in your pocket is the physical size of the sensor: bigger pixels make better pictures. Unfortunately, while the DP-1 did feature a large sensor, many found it lacking in just about every other area — it was slow, focused poorly, and for all the sensor hype, the images really didn’t pop. Widespread disappointment ensued.

But now we have a second chance at the holy grail — and that alone is exciting — but Olympus has already upped the ante before they’re even out of the gate. Not only will the cameras be small, but they’ll feature interchangeable lenses, and you can even use your existing Four-Thirds lenses (if you have any; with an adapter). In addition, they’ve hinted at a movie mode in future models, which will put them a step beyond current DSLRs and level the playing field with existing compact digital cameras. (Personally, I know of people who have staved off a DSLR purchase for that very reason.)

And while the camera is all theory for now, what’s not is that Olympus, with their existing Four-Thirds lineup, has proven themselves a competent digital camera manufacturer, was the first to bring “Live View” to the DSLR market (which these new cameras are sure to rely on), and has shown that they can get good, if not great, image quality from their sensor format. Looks to me like the Micro version has a lot more than a fighting chance.