There's a word you don't see every day - pellicle - as in pellicle mirror. A pellicle mirror is a semi transparent mirror - a (light) beam splitter. Sony has announced the A53 and A55 SLR's where the mirror assembly is stationary, 70% of the light passes through to the sensor, the remaining 30% goes to metering and the electronic viewfinder. Interesting. The idea is that, since there is no moving mirror, the camera should be smaller and there should be continuous, and faster, focusing and capturing.
I wonder what descriptive name will be used for this arrangement? Technically it's still an SLR, just without a pentaprism and a moving mirror. It took a long time to come up with descriptive names for interchangeable lens compact cameras. Olympus neatly side-stepped this with PEN and Micro Four Thirds.
The idea is not new. Canon had the Pellix and F1 Pellix way back and pellicle technology is still in use today. In most SLR's the mirror often has a semi-transparent section for metering and auto-focusing. The difference is the mirror flips. The problem with pellicles is that they divide the light stream. This isn't much of a problem with sensors - you just adjust them so that the ISO's line up. In this case the EVF has to be gained up, a lot I would think.
Now, the thing is that SLR's with flipping mirrors have the advantage of giving you an exact view of what the lens sees - at the speed of light. We don't really notice the "blackout" except during long exposures. The sensor also gets 100% of the light, as does the viewfinder (since it's optical). We've more or less adapted to this blackout period. It also makes it easier to frame and focus in low light. EVF's can be quite wonky in low light.
I'm curious to see how this plays out. Camera design has been pretty stale until recently so the more unique concepts the better. I'll check it out at Photo Expo but I'm pretty set in my Olympus ways...
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