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Photographypress has an article up stating that Olympus is denying the rumors about their rumored new DSLR, and Photographypress is taking that to mean that the PDF file with all the information is fake:

Olympus has moved to quash rumours online about a leaked PowerPoint presentation that supposedly contained info about its forthcoming “P-E1″ digital SLR.

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According to the apparently fake document, first posted on the FourThirdsPhoto Forum, Olympus is pitching the new model as a competitor to the Nikon D200 and the Canon EOS 30D.

However, that’s not what the statement they received said, at all. I’m not sure how they came to that conclusion from the statement. If nothing else, that statement seems to confirm that this is all true, since the spokesman doesn’t deny that the document is real or deny any of the statement in it:

In a statement to PhotographyPress a spokesman for the company said:

“We are not in a position to comment on any of this information but what I can say is that Olympus has not released a presentation on any new SLR body following the launch of the E-410 and E-510.

We are devoted to developing the E-1 successor model in order to make an announcement and launch the product within this year.

Further details will be provided when the dates for the announcement and product launch have been fixed. Product specifications cannot be released until the official announcement of the new product”.

I just don’t see where they get “the document is fake” from that bit of “we didn’t release that document to the public and don’t want to talk about it until later.” Not to mention the way they’ve asked sites that have posted the PDF to take it down.

It looks like someone leaked a document from an Olympus European business meeting from a little over a month ago, which lists some should-have-been-secret facts about Olympus’s DSLR business — their market size has grown almost 50% every year since 2004 — and also gives all kinds of details about their new digital SLR camera that’s now expected to come out some time in October. They had officially announced a successor to the E-1, and this seems to be it.

The specs listed in the document:

• 10 megapixel sensor
• Five frames per second burst speed
• Swiveling LCD screen, with live view. I’ve been waiting for a swiveling LCD on a DSLR ever since live view starting showing up
• Maximum shutter speed of 1/8000 sec
• Eleven-point autofocus, all points are cross-type
• Improved autofocus in dim light conditions
• Improved continuous autofocus
• A sensor dust reduction system
• In-camera image sensor stabilization that’s been improved to allow shutter speeds up to five steps slower than without IS
• Wireless control of flash units, along with two new flash units, the FL-36R and FL-50R
• A larger viewfinder that covers 100 per cent of the camera view and magnifies it by a factor of 1.15
• An extra battery compartment and vertical grip

It’s a pretty impressive list of specifications. We’ll see if it all comes true. Olympus hasn’t commented, but has asked one web site to take the leaked PDF document down, which would seem to imply that it was probably a real leaked document. But we’ll see what we get officially from them down the road.

Adobe’s John Nack posted a blog entry pointing people to a Photoshop and Bridge performance survey that Adobe is doing. They want to know what areas are the most important to Photoshop users so that they know where to put most of their efforts. You should all run over there and put in your thoughts — no, I haven’t done it yet, stop calling me hypocritical — so that when the next version of Photoshop comes out you can at least shout, “Dammit, why didn’t they listen to me!!” instead of “Dammit, why isn’t this any faster!!”

DCViews has a review posted of the new Nikon D40x digital SLR. To be honest, they don’t really say much review-like about the camera. They say it’s pretty similar to the D40 and list a few specs that have changed (max 1/200 flash sync instead of 1/500, adding ISO 100, better battery life) but that’s about it. A few reduced resolution sample photos.

They do go into some detail about transferring photos from the camera under Windows Vista, and some issue with Vista modifying the .NEF raw files directly, which seems especially braindead, even for Windows. Not much about the camera in the review, to be honest. I’m not sure how many people directly connect their camera to a computer to transfer pictures instead of just using a card reader, and I’m not sure how many people would use built-in Vista tools to work with them; my guess is those are both a low percentage of DSLR users.

They conclude that there’s just really not that much difference between the D40x and the D40:

Why Nikon decided to release this upgrade so soon we can only guess, but rumour has it that the immensely popular Canon 400D might have played a role here. The new D40x — on paper at least — is meant to face the competition head on, with matching features to the Canon bar the anti-dust function. Whether it succeeds in surpassing the 400D however only time will tell, but current owners of the older camera do not have to trade in their D40 for the D40X just for a few megapixels more, as we found no significant change in image quality or performance. Both cameras are equally good and highly recommended in our view and their full compatibility with Windows Vista only adds to their appeal.