Olympus To Market Interchangeable Lens SLR For Less Than Using Kodak CCD

We received an email last night from Kumio Yamada who runs the digitalcamera.gr.jp web site. He said that Mr. Kojima of Olympus announced at Kodak e-Revolution2001 that they would be building a digital SLR with interchangeable lenses based around the Kodak 4/3-inch 5-megapixel KAF-5100CE imager. The most intriguing part of this news was the price, 200,000 Yen which is roughly USD for the body and a lens. Olympus would be making a selection of five lenses available for the new camera. The official announcement of the new camera will come at PMA 2002 in February with the sale to commence by autumn, just in time for Photokina. Olympus is also developing a "mass power supply, a "grip system, "a mass storage system (optical magnetism type), a "macroscopic system" and the camera may also support the new Bluetooth wireless standard.

Needless to say that we will stay on top of this story and we'll be looking for future information as we get closer to PMA 2002.