Olympus Interview, Part Three:
Part Three of DigitalcameraInfo.com’s exclusive interview with Olympus product managers Richard Pelkowski and Sally Smith Clemens offers more market impact analysis, including speculation on how other manufacturers may respond. Smith Clemens and Pelkowski also discuss the future of live view on Olympus DSLRs and provide more detail on the mechanisms of the live view itself.

DCI: How do you foresee this release impacting that higher-priced ultra zoom fixed lens segment of the camera market?

Pelkowski: I think that it could have a very significant effect on it. You may or may not be aware, but we’ve announced a lens last fall that’ll we’ll begin shipping by the end of this month. It’s a 10x optical zoom lens at a very affordable price. To cut to the chase: You could have this camera and that lens for a price point at something like the new Sonys, and you have a much more capable product than just a 10x ultra zoom fixed lens camera.

DCI: No question.

Smith Clemens: 18-180 mm, Alex.

Pelkowski: 18-180, so that’s a 36-360mm ultra zoom lens for this type of customer at a price point under $500.

Smith Clemens: Its only about 3 inches tall, too. It’s real small, the size of a coffee cup.

DCI: So, to come back to where we started. We covered some of this, but could you again give more of an overview of the [live view] technology and how the major obstacles that other manufacturers are facing were overcome?

Pelkowski: Sure. I think presently, they’re limited very much by the viewfinder design they’re using, which is a pentaprism and pentamirror with it. With a pentamirror SLR, Let’s just say an D-50, D-70 or even our E-500, you really wouldn’t be able to do this without having an asymmetrical bump off to one side of the prism, because the optical path is coming up from the bottom. You probably have to take the CCD somewhere; you can’t have it inside there, so it would have to be bulging out somewhere on the side. I don’t think anyone has been ready to do that. There could also be a lot of other engineering limitations that I may not even be aware of right now.

DCI: And do you expect this technology to filter into other [Olympus] cameras, or do you see the E-500 and E-330 as beginning separate lines, one with a live view, one without? How do you foresee this technology making its way to other Olympus DSLRS?

Pelkowski: I can only speak for the E system products, but when we develop a feature for the E system product that becomes a standard. For instance, the dust reduction system, which we didn’t even talk about--this camera does contain a dust reduction system, and every E-System camera that we will ever produce will have the dust reduction system. So this is a new standard for E system products. You can very much expect to see live view in future E system digital SLR bodies from us. And those could be at any price point.

Smith Clemens: And it’s likely that we will still keep the traditional look, Richard, as well? Like the E-500?

Pelkowski: Oh yeah. Absolutely.

Smith Clemens: So. You really answered it yourself, Alex. It’s a separate category within the E line of the traditional-looking bodies, that look and feel more like traditional SLRs.

DCI: So conceivably, the next version of the E-500 could possibly NOT have the live preview?

Pelkowski: Um. I’d say more likely it will.

Smith Clemens: Richard, stop me if I’m incorrect, but is it possible that you can still see cameras with only optical viewfinders in the line?

Pelkowski: I can’t sit here and say that for certain, but there is a very good probability that all future SLRs may have live preview.

DCI: How much impact do you expect this release to have with other manufacturers? What do you expect the curve to be before people start attempting to replicate this? Obviously, people are already working on this now…

Pelkowski: I think the manufactures will try to replicate it very quickly. The product has not been announced [at the time of this interview], and the only reaction we have to it to so far are from press meetings. We’ve talked to a couple of very large dealers about the camera. They’re giving us feedback that’s in line with what we’re thinking--what we’re feeling about the camera, who’s going to use it, what the acceptance is going to be. So I don’t think this is going to be a 100,000 unit product for us, but I think it’s really going to shake up the industry, this segment of the still camera market.

DCI: That’s interesting. Because I could see it going the other way, possibly.

Smith Clemens: What do you mean?

DCI: Obviously, the E-300 and the E-500 have had some success. But I could see this being a real breakthrough for the line.

Pelkowski: It could be. And I really appreciate that positive point of view. It could be. It’s just that…

Smith Clemens: We’ve been talking to, as Richard said, some of our other dealers and to you guys (the press) because when it’s something like this that’s never existed before, you have to get your initial batch out there to see what kind of response you have. I’m not the one who talks to the dealers directly, but my guess is they’re responding the same way… as Rich mentioned, this is probably going to shake the industry up. It will probably send other manufacturers scrambling to the drawing board to try and duplicate the same type of functionality.

DCI: Absolutely. And I mean, we have to acknowledge that over at least the last four or five years, you guys have made a pretty bold attempt to integrate technologies that aren’t in existence, such as move forms with the E-300 body. Is that something that’s a conscious attempt at Olympus, or is that something that’s evolved in certain stages of development? Does that make sense?

Smith Clemens: It does to me, and I’ve got to jump in. You totally put into words, Alex, the whole kind of philosophy of the company in terms of development in the consumer products category. It’s really not any accident at all that Olympus has over the years stepped out of the norm. Its one thing that I have to say just as a photographer and not just as an Olympus employee: Olympus has never been afraid to put themselves out there and bring products to market that a lot of people have never seen before. Sometimesthey’re received really well and sometimes people are like “What the heck is that?” One thing you have to say about Olympus is that they’re not afraid to really put themselves out there and really push the envelope in the introduction/applications of new technologies. And the good thing about that, regardless of how the product is initially received in terms of sales and units and this and that, in general it has a positive impact on the entire industry. It forces all of us: it forces the manufacturers, the retailers, and it forces you and I, the end user, photographers, whoever we are, to rethink about the applications of technology and how to utilize these tools in ways that we may never have thought of before-- isn’t it cool that somebody (Olympus) is showing different ways we canrealize the benefit of the new technology.

DCI: I completely agree. The success of the product is obviously yet to be determined. But the influence it will have should extend far beyond this particular model.

Smith Clemens: Oh yeah. This is just my Sally Smith Clemens prediction, but I think we will probably see other manufacturers introduce products this year that offer live view. Just because, like you, Alex, I think it’s going to have a huge impact. Particularly for the mass consumers that are used to already using a consumer digital camera that has live view--those guys just expect it. They just expect an SLR, once they’re ready to jump into that category, to have a live view. It’s amazing that we haven’t had it up until now. And leave it to Olympus to be the first ones to bring it out. We’ve never been afraid to be the first ones to do anything before. We were really the first ones to introduce from the 100% from the ground up digital SLR, the E-1, with dedicated digital specific interchangeable lenses. We offer the largest line of dedicated digital optics, all of the accessories, even the dedicated flash units offer upgradeable firmware in so that end users can take advantage of the latest technologies in an integrated system. Other manufacturers are still entrenched with one foot on the film side, trying to bring the customer base over gradually, so that they don’t lose any customers. We (Olympus) just jumped in feet first. We thought, “You know what, let’s use the technology, let’s not be held to the past, let’s produce a product all designed around digital technology,” and that’s really what we’ve done.

DCI: We were interested in the evolution of the LCD through the Olympus camera digital lineage, if you will--when the first LCD was introduced into an Olympus camera and how that particular technology has evolved into this.

Pelkowski: Our very first digital cameras that we introduced, which were the D200, the DL 200 and the DL 300, were way back in ’98 I think.

Smith Clemens: I think that was in ’96.

Pelkowski: Those cameras were fixed focal length autofocus cameras. They did have regular optical viewfinders, and they did also have TTL LCD viewfinders that were probably 1.5-inch diagonal. Probably about 800,000 pixel LCDs.

DCI: So all Olympus cameras have had LCDs?

Pelkowski: We’ve always used that. Yes.

Smith Clemens: We were I think, weren’t we Richard, the first camera manufacturer/optical company to introduce the digital SLR that had a fixed lens? It was the D600 and D500 in 1997, correct?

Pelkowski: Well, those were the first ones at any affordable price point. I mean, at that time, Kodak had those 2 bodies out.

Smith Clemens: They did? At this exact same time?

Pelkowski: Yeah. They did. They were really expensive at that time. I think they were $20,000 for the bodies, the one that used the Canon mount and the Nikon mount. Anyway, those were breakthrough products at the time, the D500 L and the D600 L. They had an optical TTL viewfinder using an optical beam splitter. They also had live view on the back, and we sold the heck out of those cameras. Those first ones were only 1.3 megapixel cameras, but there was just absolutely nothing like it out there at the time. And I mean, when the camera first got introduced, I think it was $2,000. You couldn’t make them fast enough.

DCI: Sorry to regress a bit, but the elements of Bright Capture that are included in this camera… are those exclusive to the LCD?

Pelkowski: No. Actually, it has to do with the CCD in the viewfinder. It’s what we call Bright Capture CCD Technology, which first showed up in our Stylus line of point-and-shoot cameras. This technology basically samples 9 pixels into 1 to get a brighter capture, and a brighter viewfinder preview. But it works better than just increasing the gain on the chip.

DCI: Was it difficult to integrate this system into a camera that has dust reduction?

Pelkowski: Actually, it was not an issue at all. The dust reduction system is working just as it did on the 500, the 30 and the E-1. It might be a different way it’s packaged with the main board and everything, but it still resides in the same place which is just behind the low pass filter. And it still works the same.

DCI: Are there any other notable differences between the E-300 and the E-330?

Pelkowski: Let’s see: sensor type; obviously one has live view.

DCI: Have you gauged performance of the various sensors? Do you feel that in addition to increased functionality, that performance will be improved as well?

Pelkowski: Good question. We’d expected it to be better at high ISO in terms of noise, but I’m not even at that point where I have anything worthwhile that I could use to compare all of them, the 500 and 300 to the 330. But I do expect it to be a bit better. There is one other small point of differentiation between the bodies and that is: the 330 actually has an eyepiece viewfinder shutter built right into the body, instead of giving you a little plastic cap like we did with the 300 and the 500.

DCI: Excellent. Many other manufacturers did the same thing.

Pelkowski: It’s a live view product and that’s very important to have that built into it. That’s a pretty premium feature to have in a camera at this price point.

DCI: Is this going to be a worldwide release next Thursday?

Pelkowski: Yes it is. Worldwide. Oh, gee. You know, there’s something I was just remembering while talking about the eyepiece shutter, too. We are introducing a high quality underwater housing for this camera. We expect to ship it around the same time as the time the camera starts to ship, which will be late winter/early spring this year. It’s a 60 meter case, very high quality and compatible with all the existing lens ports, strobe housings and brackets. This is the first true digital SLR that can give you live view that also has underwater capability. Which is really big, because everything else out there, every single thing out there right now that has a high quality case for an interchangeable lens involves an optical viewfinder--which is not a nice thing to be using underwater. 

And we have lens ports for our fish-eye lens and our 7-14 zoom, and also our 11-22, the wide angles that really lend themselves to that type of photography.

DCI: Do you think that the live preview would be possible with a full-frame sensor or anything that requires that much power?

Pelkowski: That’s a darn good question. I didn’t think of that yet. It’s going be an issue. You can imagine the power consumption has got to be close to 100 percent greater, right?

DCI: Yeah.

Pelkowski: Boy, that’s a great question. I’ll see if I can get more information on that. I like that.

DCI: Great. Well. Richard Pelkowski and Sally Smith Clemens, thank you. Again, I can’t stress enough how appreciative we are for both your time and the exclusive.

Smith Clemens: Thank you, Alex. It’s a learning experience for us, too. You asked a lot of really great questions.

DCI: Well great. We’re certainly excited to be able to put this interview out there, and we’re also excited over the product. And, again, we appreciate your time.

Part Two	Page 4 of 4
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