Is Sony up to it?

Had this come out two months ago, I might have had severe reservations about buying the E-PL1, but I'm glad it didn't. I admire the metal housing for the Sony lens, and the look of the camera really impresses me. However, I don't know if I would like the Sony color. One of the nice surprises about the EPx is the the so-called Olympus color jpeg output. It is far better than I expected. Furthermore, the only reason I obtained a micro 4/3rd body in the first place was that the format allowed me to resurrect my Contax G rangefinder lenses using an adapter. And I wouldn't have had the Olympus to take overseas recently...

Aesthetically the Sony design spanks the pants off of my E-PL1, but compromises are always inevitable. Furthermore, looking at samples on the web, the seemingly fast pancake 16mm Sony lens produces mediocre images, especially on the edges. Soft, and I swear I see some distortion too.

 

i got to handle the sony briefly when the sony rep pulled one out of his bag case at b&h photo this weekend , it is absurdly tiny and the 16 mm lens seems to be about the same size as the 20 1.7 panny,, its an odd marrage of lens and body even with its smallest lens...... the most impressive feature was the sweep panaroma but its not enuf to save this camera

i consider this camera a sad failure of the imagination .... sony obsessed with making the body tiny and indeed it is.... it a sliver shapes point and shoot sized affair with almost no buttons or dials,with a lens mount larger than the body!
it is designed with contempt for a thinking person who may want to adjust iso or exposure ,and seems to only have the casual snapshooter in mind from a design useability standpoint .

if sony could have made the body so small then they could have created a machine with an internal evf and hotshoe and normal controls , with an m mount adapter at launch [and others],along with a requisite green mode or i auto mode for the newbie, they would have had 10 million preorders worldwide the first week before a single point and shooter even knew the thing existed

so of course sony being sony didnt do it ,
also they could have bundled it with a 25 or 30 mm f 1.8 pancake instead of a 16 with a 24mm equiv fov

that 24mm is the cheapest bundle sony offers ,thousands will buy this not knowing that a 16 mm aps lens is simply too wide to keep on a camera 24-7....i pity the poor point and shooter
who thinks they will ever produce a proper close portrait or get much resembling what they did when the had at least a normal fov to use ...... sheesh


the lens i saw has a housing beautifully machined from some alloy , it makes all my native m4\3 lenses look and feel like cheap toys, props to sony there at very least