The E-P1 has been officially released and DPReview has am excellent interview with Akira Watanabe, product planning manager of Olympus's SLR division. One of the many interesting facts Watanabe shared was the fact that Olympus is using automatic lens distortion correction in order to keep Micro Four Thirds lenses as small as possible.

Readers of this blog will know that software correction of lens barrel distortion is what allowed Panasonic to design such a compact and fast wide zoom for the LX3. The similarly compact Olympus ZD 25mm f/2.8 lens for Four Thirds also had a significant degree of barrel distortion; however, this was uncorrected in software.

Although I am excited to see the tiny 17mm f/2.8 lens from Olympus and prototype 20mm f/1.7 lens from Panasonic, both for the Micro Four Thirds system, I do hope that they haven't gone too far in relying on software correction of lens distortion. For one thing, distortion correction comes at a cost in terms of resolution. Another consequence is that third-party RAW support for the distortion correction will likely lag considerably. Wonder why Apple's Aperture still doesn't support the LX3? I don't know the answer, but I suspect it has to do with Apple's failure to address the severe barrel distortion of that lens.

The Watanabe review presents more information about Micro Four Thirds than just the bit about automatic lens distortion correction. I was pleased to learn that Olympus' new image processor has allowed them to use a lighter antialiasing filter.

Link: DPR - More in the Micro Four Thirds pipeline