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.

The other week at the UWCCF grad dinner, I figured that since it's my last year, I should actually bring a camera this year to snap photos with everyone.

I decided that I should leave my SLD camera (is that what they're calling them now?) at home and opt for a compact point and shoot, my FX520. Given that I wouldn't be the one taking most of the pictures with the camera, I decided to give Panasonic's much touted intelligent auto (iA) mode a run for its money. Essentially trusting the little camera to make all important photographic decisions for the night.

And in some cases, it performed quite well. But in others, it gave some pretty terrible results. In most cases when it did, the person taking the photo noticed and took another one. But there were at least one or two where I only had one shot, and the iA picked the wrong settings for the shot! So disappointed!

All photos were shot indoors in relatively low light (artificial incandescent lighting), so you would expect that the camera should push the aperture as large as possible.

But there's this one picture that I really wish turned out better (group shot with all the Singaporeans/former Singaporeans/Singapore PR). And the camera's choice of parameters baffles me. If I were to take the shot, I would choose wide open aperture (in this case f/2.8) and a slower shutter speed with flash (or just set to slow synchro flash on aperture priority). ISO maybe around 200 to 400. And what did the camera pick? Well ok it got the slow synchro alright. And picked ISO 400, which isn't terrible. But some how, it picked f/4.0. Say what? Why would you pick f/4.0 on a point and shoot in low lighting. You can't even use increasing depth of field, or stopping down to sharpen the image as an excuse here. It's a point and shoot!

I thought maybe it's because the person taking the shot zoomed in, which would reduce the max aperture. But I checked the focal length in the EXIF data as well. And nope, it was at the full wide end, which should have allowed the camera to pick f/2.8!

Bizarre! I used to think that I could just set my cameras on iA anytime I give it to someone to shoot for me. But now I'm not so sure.

I think I would have gotten much more consistent pictures from the night if I set my FX520 on aperture priority with slow synchro flash at a fixed ISO (say 400). Strange!

The weather has been so nice lately. But we all have to study hard.

What does it taste like? I'm not sure. I didn't drink it after taking a photo of it.

The sky was an amazing shade of blue today. The photo below is straight out of the camera (DMC-FX520), with no polarizing filter! No HDR or other post-processing. Yet such a deep blue. So nice.

It was such a beautiful day. If only I didn't have my design project to finish, I'm sure I would have been running around like crazy taking pictures of things.

I need to give my DMC-G1 a workout sometime soon, but I'm actually quite amazed at what the FX520 is capable of still. The 25mm equivalent lens is wide enough for some interesting perspective shots.

Speaking of wide-angle, that's actually one thing I realized sometime ago. That is, wide-angle lenses aren't necessarily and exclusively for "fitting everything in the frame." While for party or group shots, that's true, but a more interesting creative possibility for wide-angle lenses is perspective isolation.

We all know that fast lenses allow for subject isolation via shallow depth of field (aka the "SLR-ish look" some might say). But a wide-angle lens gives you subject isolation via perspective stretching.

Telephoto lenses compress the scene, while wide-angle lenses stretch or expand the scene.

Unfortunately, the widest angle lens I have is the fixed lens on my FX520. The widest lens I have for my G1 is the kit 14-45mm lens, which is somewhat wide at a 35mm equivalent of 28mm, but still not wide enough for the true perspective stretching that an ultra-wide-angle lens will give you.

But alas, the Panasonic 7-14mm lens is like $1500 or something. So, I probably won't be shooting with a lens like that any time soon.

In the mean time, I wonder what kind of interesting photography compositions I'll be able to create with my existing kit of 14-45mm, 50mm and 45-200mm (effectively 28-400mm in 35mm terms).

I'm looking forward to our upcoming grad trip. I shall be filling up my hard drive soon enough. And who knows how huge of a RAW processing backlog I will get.