Rendezvous@NanoMakia

nanomakia.com is officially being accepted into Sarawak Bloggers blog-sphere!

Keeman invited and I thought that anyone could just become part of it. But frankly, being invited does make the owner of the blog flattered in some ways, especially when you thought that your blog is good enough for a very few readers to read. Or you only blog when you feel like blogging and not really into it.

Anyways, we’re happy to be invited into the blog-sphere. We are not only happy, we’re MORE than happy! Why? We’re not just a casual blogger. We’re in the prime bloggers’ category! It sort of gave us the recognition as we are part of the serious bloggers out there. Hehehe… I bet you will be seeing more posts from us onwards. (Mainly Paul’s)

A friend was asking me what camera they should get for around 500-600 dollar (RM1600-2000).

What they wanted:

• Small and compact
• Shoots fast
• Good image quality
• Low image noise

What I had in mind:

• Canon G11 (good size, nice screen but small sensor)
• Canon S90 (smaller size, but small sensor and limited range)
• Olympus E-PL1 (a little bit bigger, sensor which is a lot bigger than the above, flexibility of changing lenses)

I finally recommended an Olympus E-PL1 even though for the same price you can get a faster entry level SLR. Main reason was portability, so a compromise for speed and price had to be taken. The main issue for the Olympus E-PL1, I think would be the focusing speed is good but definitely slower than the Panasonic GF-1, at least that is according to reviews. The Panasonic GF-1 was too expensive while entry level SLRs were simply too big.

With the introduction of micro 4/3 form factor, digital SLR-like cameras can be smaller while allowing the flexibility to fit different lenses according to different situations. The sensors on these systems are a lot bigger than those on the G11 or S90. The camera bodies itself while reasonable bigger than G11 or S90, it is still a lot smaller than even entry level SLRs.

I am really looking forward for this standard to mature as I feel that this standard allows lenses to be significantly smaller than lenses for full-frame or APS-C sized sensor. This allows it to be truly more portable than even those mirror-less APS-C cameras. The recent announcement of Quantum Technology for digital sensors means a whole new level of performance. Imagine 4x better light sensitivity. This would truly help the micro 43 standard. If you can get current full-frame sensor performance from a 43 sized sensor with this technology, that would truly be amazing for this camera segment.

Last week the weather was awesome, plenty of sun shining. I even noticed some grass starting to grow… Then came this week with the rain and the snow and the wind. Really cannot wait for the flowers to bloom again, for the heat to radiate and for the temperature to rise. Winter ain’t fun after a while.