An emerging technology was starting to mature.

February, I reckoned, would be just about the perfect time to replace my three-year old, but highly-beloved, Nikon P6000 pocket camera. It’s exactly the sort of camera I like: small enough to slip into any jacket pocket, but big enough to operate comfortably, and with a key sprinkling of advanced features that allowed me to use it as my sole travel camera.

Last year, I did some work for a pal of mine for free and he generously gave me his Olympus PEN E-P1 camera as a thank-you gift. After just a month or two I fell slightly in love with the Micro Four Thirds system. It filled a specific gap for me: I travel a hell of a lot, and I take a hell of a lot of photos, and I often am hellaciously fussy about the results. As great as my little Nikon is, there’s no getting around the facts: it has a eensy, fingernail-sized image sensor and you can’t swap out its fixed zoom for a lens that’s more appropriate to the situation…like Panasonic’s magnificent 20mm f1.7.

With that lens on the Olympus’ body, I had nearly the optimum travel camera. It had most of the important features of my SLR and it wasn’t that much larger than the Nikon.