The Olympus E-P1 looks absolutely stunning. It’s highly likely that I’ll be buying one of those come September.
The E-P1 does away with the mirror box of D-SLRs, whilst retaining a large Micro Four Thirds sized sensor, which results in a camera which isn’t really an SLR, but produces high quality images akin to those typical of D-SLRs. It seems to be an ideal camera for street photography – the silver model isn’t overly obtrusive, and coupled with the 17mm lens and optical viewfinder (fitted onto the hot-shoe), makes for a compact camera capable of taking high-quality images whilst still being small enough to not be highly noticeable. It is quite expensive, at £749.99 for the kit including the 17mm lens and optical viewfinder, but I feel that it is well worth it, and there won’t be many (if any) running costs involved – no film to develop and scan. As well as this, Olympus will be producing an adaptor which will allow me to use my OM lenses from my OM-2n on the E-P1, which is a great benefit. I will be waiting until reviews are available on the camera before making a final decision, but I’m almost certain that it is the camera for me.
I have also been looking into the 13″ MacBook Pro, and believe that come September, I will have enough money to purchase a model. I’m willing to accept the lower resolution of the 13″ model due to the extra portability offered, especially as I am also planning to purchase the 24″ Apple Cinema Display to go with it, which runs at 1920×1200. An expensive investment, but well worth it I feel. The MacBook Pro comes with an SDHC card-reader, which will be extremely useful when coupled with the aforementioned Olympus E-P1, which also uses SDHC cards – that’s one less cable for me to worry about! It is highly likely that I will purchase Aperture with the MacBook, and use that for photo management. I’ve looked into Lightroom as well, but it seems from reviews that Aperture is more suited to my needs. Furthermore, Macs provide an ideal environment for doing development work in, especially as they are Unix-based, and thus have a half-decent shell available to users. I’ll most likely be using Eclipse for Java programming, and I’ll possibly be doing some Qt development on Macs as well, but we shall see.
