The G1 is small enough for my uses, especially with M mount primes attached. The 500D, even with an adapted pancake, is much larger (the G1 with a CV 35/2.5 is smaller than the 500D body with no lens mounted)...
This point interested me. To my mind the only dimension that really matters for pocketability is depth. While the m4/3 register is only 20mm, it seems that the EP1 is about 17mm deeper due to the monitor. The M system register is 27.95mm, so with an M adaptor the depth of the cameras will be around 45mm. I measure my 450D to be about 59mm from mount to camera back. There\'s the rubber eyepiece and a couple of millimetres of protrusion at the thumbhold, but those aren\'t significant obstacles to pocketability. That means that the m4/3 cameras with a Leica M adaptor are shedding about 14mm of depth against a 500D IF YOU IGNORE protrusions on the front of the camera, which I do, since normally a lens is mounted and extends further forwards than the flash or finger-grip.
BUT here\'s the rub: it\'s 2x crop instead of 1.6x crop, which means that standard focal lengths are in the 17-20mm range instead of the 24-35mm range, so if you are going to use an M lens as a standard lens, you\'re going to be putting quite a big lens on your M adaptor. For instance, the Leica 21 f2.8 is 46mm deep, whereas the Oly OM 24mm f2.8 is only about 33mm deep (or less) with an EOS adaptor. There goes your 14mm depth saving. There may be some very shallow M system ultrawides that I don\'t know about, but essentially, unless you use m4/3 lenses, the size saving of m4/3 in the crucial dimension is lost, if you intend to use normal to wide fields of view. It would be interesting to see views from above of the shallowest 500D and G1/EP1 setups for wide to standard focal lengths. I suspect a 500D with shallow Oly OM prime won\'t generally be much deeper than an equivalent M lens on m4/3. Maybe the fold-away Leica lenses are the answer, but I think they\'re all portrait focal lengths on m4/3.
Now with regard to the specific claim that \"the G1 with a CV 35/2.5 is smaller than the 500D body with no lens mounted\", I estimate the depth of the G1/CV/adaptor to be about 75mm, assuming that the CV is about 30mm long. The 500D\'s depth is probably just less than that if you include the extra 12 or so mm of the flash protrusion, but don\'t forget that the 12mm of the flash protrusion overhangs the lens, so if you include that then be sure to count your lens as 12mm shorter. In brief, I would like to see that claim proved before believing it, and I would like to see depth comparison between the G1/M-adaptor/CV 35, and, for instance, 500D+Oly 40 f2. I don\'t think there will be much in it, depth-wise.
The next question is this: is the EP1 plus kit zoom deeper than a 500D with Oly 21 f3.5, and by how much? I\'m too tired to work it out. And how does image quality compare.
Apparently the AF on the EP1 is quite slow. One thing that has put me off the G1 so far is that there have been no real pancake lenses for it. Maybe the answer is to put the Oly m4/3 17 f2.8 on a G1. Yum.
