brainiac wrote: 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.
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.
I\'m mostly looking at M lenses for my longer stuff and the Oly 17 and Panny 20 for my primary wide/normals (either of which would need an ~11mm equivalent to be matched on the EOS body). I\'ve also been considering the CV 15/4.5, which is 38.2mm deep as a wider option. The CV 35/1.4 is even smaller at 28.5mm deep. And a 25/4 Color-Skopar is 29.5mm with hood, with the 21/4 being marginally larger. And remember that those lenses can be critically focused via the VF or the rear LCD on the G1, I wouldn\'t trust a 500D\'s viewfinder for critical focus. The G1 is also both shorter and less wide than the 500D, by enough to be noticeable, if not necessarily as significant as the depth.
And the CV 35/2.5 is 23mm long. So I was off by a bit size-wise, but that means the G1/CV35 combo is only 9mm longer than a 500D body-only.
