I normally don’t post too much about new camera announcements (even though I follow them pretty closely, I’m obviously a gear nut!), but this year’s photokina has 2 new compact cameras that have caught my attention enough I thought I’d mention them.  The first is Fuji’s X100.  It was announced before the show and EVERYONE has been drooling over it.  The price was originally rumored at $1500~$1700 and most everyone balked at that number asking if they thought they were leica…    Well it’s now rumored to be ~$1000 and available sometime in march.  At that price it’s much more reasonable, but still quite expensive (considering the NEX5 is $650 and the GF1 $720) especially considering you only get a single fixed lens which is also fixed in terms of focal length (23mm which is 35mm effective with it’s APS-C sensor)…  But I noticed something in the images of the camera…  the thing LOOKS thin.  I read the specs and it’s ~127mm across the back so I hopped into photoshop with some of the press images and scaled the x100 and several other EVIL options to their respective widths and noticed that the X100 is indeed much thinner than any of it’s competitors…  Having owned a GF1 with the 20mm pancake pictured above, I can attest to it’s thickness being the hardest dimension to deal with when it comes to putting the camera in a (jacket or cargo) pocket…  So if the X100 is indeed thinner as it’s said to be, it could be a very nice “pocket” camera.  Having owned ONLY the 20mm on my GF1 (40mm effective) I found that a nice compromise EFL for day to day shooting so the 35mm effective here won’t be an issue for me.  F/2 is fast, but still slower than the 1.7 on the GF1’s 20mm, but the fact the sensor is a step up size wise they should offer similar results (and the NEX5’s pancake is 2.8 with the same sensor size and sony processing so this SHOULD beat that).  I LOVE the manual controls though, very slick.  The whole design is just awesome.  I can’t wait to see one in March (in my own hands?)….

here’s some more info on the X100.

and a video:

The second camera that caught my eye is the new olympus camera. There’s very little info available on it other than it having a zoom lens made by zuiko… Well I noticed something in engadet’s video… The accessory port and hot shoe look identical to the ones used on the E-PL1… So I dropped shots of both into PS and scaled the new camera’s width to match and it looks like this “beast” is going to be a MFT sensored compact? The lens itself again looks thinner than anything I’ve seen on a MFT body which will make this a very nice size if it performs. I’m excited to see what the lens specs are and if it indeed has a MFT sensor in it… Even if it doesn’t it could be a great s90/s95 competitor…. You can read “more” about it here.