The E-M5 sensor…from Sony!

Back in February Olympus announced the popular Olympus E-M5 camera. They didn’t unveil the sensor manufacturer that they said was not Panasonic. Yesterday Olympus President Hiroyuki Sasa “confessed” that the sensor has been made by Sony (Source: Yahoo Japan).

So after Nikon (for example the D800), Pentax (K-5) and Ricoh (See some GXR modules) we now have Olympus on board. Sony is far away from becoming the DSLR and Mirrorless camera market leader but they are now close to dominate the global sensor market!

RX100 rules the rankings and shipping in two weeks:
BHphoto (Click here) finally reported a shipping date for the new Sony RX100. Ant the RX100 remains the most sold overall(!) digital camera at Amazon US (click here to see the ranking).

That said I have to report something interesting about the sensor size definition:
Like him or not his blog is many times more popular than SAR. And on his website (Click here and scroll down) he just launched a heavy Sony attack he launched on he website. He writes about the RX100: “Sony is deceptive when claiming a “1 inch” sensor. Its image area is only 8.8 x 13.2 millimeters (0.34″ x 0.52″), so where is the FTC when you need them to stop this baloney?”
Let’s start with the naked truth, he is certainly RIGHT by saying that it’s not exactly an 1 inch sensor. But there are a few things he didn’t mention.

1) First, the sensor of the RX100 has the same size of that of the Nikon 1 and I found it weird that he didn’t attack Nikon before. Nikon itself also says it’s a 1 inch sensor (press release here at dpreview) and on Ken’s Nikon 1 preview he didn’t deserve Nikon the same critic. Maybe I missed it to find it or he forgot to mention it.

2) Wikipedia reports that “Sensor formats of digital cameras are mostly expressed in the non-standardized “inch” system as approximately 1.5 times the length of the diagonal of the sensor“. And David Pogue of the New York Times states that “the actual sensor size is much smaller than what the camera companies publish – about one-third smaller.”
In short…EVERYONE is cheating :)

This is just to say that Ken is right when saying that there is a need for a clear standard, but it’s pretty unfair to attack Sony on that matter when actually everybody (Nikon, Canon and others) do the same. Please do not transform this in a pro or against KEN debate. My only intention was to make it clear for you how this sensor size definition actually works.

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RX100 Preorders at Amazon US, Adorama, BHphoto, Amazon Germany, Amazon France and Jessops.