The mirrorless camera world has been full of action within the last year. Mirrorless cameras take your traditional 50-year old single-lens-reflex camera design and remove the reflex mirror and optical viewfinder. The advent of the digital camera's live-view functionally removes the necessity of this mechanical component. Thus you find yourself with a camera that uses a consumer sensor format (APS-C or Four Thirds) typically only found in entry-mid DSLR cameras inside a smaller body with no optical viewfinder.

Panasonic and Olympus paved the way for this break with tradition by introducing their Micro Four Thirds system two years ago. This new format garnered a lot of praise from some professional photographers as producing a compact imaging format producing near "DSLR-quality" results.

While Panasonic and Olympus have been steadily building up their system by adding numerous quality lenses and bodies, other consumer electronics giants have been working on competing systems as well.

Samsung has since released their NX system, and more recently, Sony has released their NEX system.

I'm very curious to see how this battle ensues given that four major players are now in the market with three competing systems (especially since I've already bought into the Micro Four Thirds camp).

Samsung and Sony have positioned themselves quite well in the consumer world so far. Samsung's NX10 is very comparable in size to Panasonic's and Olympus' Four Thirds-based offerings while Sony has seemingly done the impossible and produced an APS-C-based camera in a package even smaller than what Samsung and Panasonic/Olympus have been able to do.

There are doubts flying around the internet about the viability of Sony's format as a quality imaging system given some apparent optical compromises they have made by choosing a flange-back distance even shorter than Micro Four Thirds while using a larger sensor. The Micro Four Thirds system is more conservative in this regard, which results in larger bodies, but some speculation I've read is that their more conservative approach may allow them to preserve their optical quality over what Sony may be able to do given their very aggressive engineering decision. Clearly for consumers, they may not care about any of these optical engineering decisions, since the bodies will be vastly smaller than Samsung's and even Panasonic/Olympus' offerings. But as a prosumer format, perhaps it will remain lacking.

Samsung? Not being well-known in the photography industry, it's still interesting to see how their format progresses, especially since they are the only player in their system (Sony is also a single player, but they've already proved that they are a viable consumer photographic equipment producer with their Alpha DSLRs).

Panasonic seems very committed to the Micro Four Thirds system - perhaps even more than they had been to the original Four Thirds system. Consider that Panasonic has only ever released two Four Thirds bodies, while since the announcement of Micro Four Thirds, they have already released five bodies for this mirrorless system, along with a respectable array of lenses spanning a range of 7mm to 200mm and soon to be extended to 300mm.

So far, Panasonic and Olympus have had the luxury of being first-to-market and early adopter loyalties. Samsung have had the luxury of being the first system to provide an APS-C-based mirrorless format. Sony have the luxury of being the smallest-bodied system.

Which format will deliver the innovation, features, usability and image quality that consumers demand?

Obviously I hope that Micro Four Thirds will come out on top. But between Samsung and Sony, I feel a bit more partial to Samsung's format. Sony's format appears to be overly-stylish than usable. Early reviews loathe the usability of the camera. Of course, user interface issues are not an attribute of the system format. But it doesn't impress for Sony's first offerings. The apparently overly-short flange-back distance seems worrying too.

But we'll see.

The giants of Canon and Nikon have been very quiet. But there is a neat distinction between Canon/Nikon and Panasonic/Samsung/Sony. The former are leaders in imaging technologies ranging from consumer DSLRs up to laboratory equipment (i.e. Nikon). Panasonic/Samsung/Sony, on the other hand, are consumer electronics giants that are wildly diversified. They also do not have major legacy SLR systems to support. Thus perhaps it has been easier for them to make this break.

If Canon and Nikon entered the mirrorless market, it would certainly cut into their DSLR sales.

But these are all just musings of an average consumer who likes taking photos with a slight gadget affinity.