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The single lens of Panasonic Lumix G1 does its job very well, but building a camera around a mirror box seriously ties the designer’s hands – not only in the physical size and shape of the body, but in the lenses too.

The explanations for this plausibly dogmatic attachment to the single lens reflex are reasonably obvious ; the main players in the market have a vested interest in maintaining compatibility with inheritance lenses and offering as seamless a transition from film to digital as practicable for their millions of existing users.

There have also been some technological barriers to cope with ; the dearth of digital displays acceptable to supply an electronic viewfinder that may even get close to a good mirror and prism, and the indisputable fact that current phase-detect auto-focus systems will not work without a mirror being the 2 most typically cited.

It is maybe unsurprising then, the first company to test the SLR hegemony is Panasonic, a manufacturer with no inheritance film SLR system to support and a share of the digital SLR market so tiny that it is comparatively straightforward to simply drop it and push on.

We strongly suspect the L10 will be the end of Panasonic’s transient expedition into the standard 4 Thirds System and that – for all of the joint development statements – it was Panasonic, not Olympus that was the driver behind the advent of Micro 4 3rds .

It’s worth recollecting this ‘mini SLR’ thing has been attempted before ; in the mid-to-late 1990’s Canon, Nikon and Minolta all launched compact SLR systems based round the new APS film format, and all did not make any impact at all.

Naturally a large amount of that was down to timing ( digital was beginning to reshape the whole landscape of the photograph industry ), but crucially these systems also offered nothing beyond a size reduction ( and a much more limited choice of films ) to set apart them from their 35mm opposite numbers.

By offering a camera that works and handles like a compact ( Panasonic FZ users will feel right at home ) but produces output a ton more like an SLR, Micro Four 3rds has chopped out a most likely profitable niche for itself in a market crying out for creativity.