Digital Home Thoughts: Olympus Announces the E-450 Compact DSLR

"Olympus has announced the E-450, an upgraded version of the E-420 compact DSLR. The new E-450 is essentially identical to the E-420 apart from the addition of 3 Art Filters, a new processor and an improved LCD display. Priced at £450 for the standard lens kit, it will start shipping from May 2009.It's perhaps a testament to how well specified the E-420 is that Olympus has clearly struggled for ways to improve it. For fear of treading on the toes of the recently announced E-620 (which itself stands uncomfortably close to the more expensive E-30), Olympus has engineered a model with the fewest changes over the existing version we've ever seen."

I don't follow Olympus cameras very closely, but it's certainly a bit of a head scratcher that they'd release a camera so close in features to the previous version. I think Olympus is falling prey to the mentality that every camera maker has when it comes to point and shoot cameras: release new versions as quickly as you can, even if they only offer incremental improvements, because maybe it might win you market share.