Pixiq

The peeps over at 43 Rumors were spot on. Panasonic has indeed announced the Lumix G3 today, the smallest and lightest mirror-less camera on the market, with allegedly the fastest auto-focusing capability of an interchangeable lens camera. They reckon it’s up to 0.1 seconds. It’s on the Micro Four Thirds mount, so has about a gajillion lenses at its disposal. And it has a touch screen. (I just felt like throwing that in there.)

It has a Venus Engine VI FHD combined with 15.8 megapixels of resolution, which they reckon will give it exceptional low-noise capabilities. You can shoot 4fps at full resolution, but if you drop to 4 megapixels, you can increase the fps rate to 20.

Advanced Intelligent Resolution technology (the terms gives me a feeling that I might living in the film Minority Report), automatically detects three areas in pictures: outlines, bits of detailed texture, and places of soft gradation. That means that outlines can be enhanced to give more clearly defined edges, whilst anything with more texture can be emphasised.

Full HD movie capability is de rigueur nowadays, so the G3 keeps up with the Jones there with full HD AVCHD 1920 x 1080, 50i. There’s full-time auto-focus and auto-focus tracking functionality; touch the screen once and the camera locks on and automatically ‘tracks’ the subject, keeping it in focus as it moves.

That touch screen lets you select your subject at the touch of, ehm, the screen. The Intelligent D-range Control (more with the Minority Report terminology) is meant to optimise exposure and ensure that colours are as accurate as they should be.

Naturally there’s a auto mode, but this one is Intelligent Auto Plus and it has MEGA O.I.S. (optical image stabilisation), Intelligent ISO control, and an Intelligent Scene Selector, so if it thinks that you’re taking a portrait it automatically switches to portrait mode, or if it thinks that you’re about to commit a crime it automatically self-destructs or informs the authorities, or something.

And finally, there are the seven preset effects – expressive, retro, pure, elegant, monochrome, dynamic art, and silhouette – alongside a custom mode, which lets you manually set the colour, brightness and saturation levels. (Woohoo for customisation!)

No one’s said how much it’ll cost yet, or when it’ll be available. I’m just looking out for Tom Cruise.