Olympus

A patent recently filed by Olympus presents an interesting way of bringing 3D photography to their ILC cameras — by adding a second lens to the hotshoe. As you can see from the patent illustrations above, it would sit in the camera's hotshoe mount, and provide a second lens for stereoscopic shooting. Sounds intriguing, but doesn't take much to envision some of the problems it might have.

Technical editor Philip Ryan spent some time last week photographing a day's worth of matches at the US Open using Olympus's new Pen E-PL3 and a handful of Micro Four Thirds lenses. He shot Federer vs Sela, Monfils vs Ferrero, Fish vs Jaziri, Stephens vs Peer, and also managed to catch Serena Williams as she signed tennis balls for fans after beating Michaelle Krajicek in only 49 minutes.

In addition to announcing a trio of new PEN micro four-thirds cameras today, Olympus also unleashed two prime lenses, a flash, and a grip designed specially for the PEN E-P3.

Rugged cameras are getting tougher all the time. They can stand bigger falls, deeper water and more brutal temperatures. To test the true burliness of the newest crop, we threw four of the latest models into a backpack and headed out to the Tough Mudder adventure race at Mt. Snow in Vermont. With 10 miles of brutal terrain and more than 25 obstacles -- many of which involve being submerged in near-freezing water -- we were interested to see which cameras were still standing at the finish line.