News about Panasonic's Lumix DMC-L1 (not the DMX-L1 as our source site says), touted as their 'first real dSLR', has been around for a little while now, but only now has the company decided to formally launch the unit. (We presume that's because they wanted the hype to reach some sort of crescendo before they did so; we're not sure at this point whether or not that's the case.)

We also have some detailed info about the camera that we didn't have earlier. The 145x86.9x80 L1 is a 7.5-megapixel dSLR that's got ISO values between 100 and 1600. It features a Leica D Vario-Elmarit 14-50mm lens with an OIS (Optical Image Stabilizer), a Dust Free Sensor that Panasonic says makes the camera a snap to keep clean (interesting - wonder how that works?), a nice bright 2.5-inch control screen, RAW/JPEG support and compatibility with SD/SDHC cards of up to 4GB capacity.

Not bad, eh? We sure think so, too. All that goodness isn't going to come cheap, though. It's to retail for a little less than 1800 EUR in Japan and 1500 EUR in the States (no clue why), which we hear is an eye-popping 700 EUR more than Canon's renowned 350D. Wonder if it'll be worth it? We'll keep you all posted.

Have a look at some more nice pictures of the Lumix DMC-L1, courtesy of the good folks from Akihabara News.

 

Kodak's got a new digital camera that features Bluetooth.  From the looks of it (or its innards, what we can see of them) it's one of the point-and-shoot which sort.

We think this could've been made with Kodak's Bluetooth-enabled photo kiosks in mind - it may in fact work best with them - that'd be a good smart way for Kodak to drum up business.  Two birds with one stone, that sort of thing.

Samsung's just announced a new variant of the venerable MMC card.  As per its name this new sort of MMC card features OneNAND technology,  which, in a nutshell, incorporates buffer memory, NAND flash memory and a controller on a single chip to speed up performance immensely.  As a result, Samsung claims, OneNAND MMC cards are approximately 10x faster than competing memory cards and twice the speed of regular MMCs.

These cards are now available in sizes between 32 and 256MB.  512MB and 1GB cards will be on sale at the end of the year. (We haven't received word on pricing yet, though.)

It's good that companies are still keeping the MMC format fresh, despite the fact that the format's been more or less superseded by the SD card and rendered practically obsolete by all the physically smaller card formats out there.  The fact that so many devices still work with them - some companies, Nokia among them, are still ardent supporters of the format - ensures that this old memory-card format will be with us for a while yet.

Over the years there've been a dizzying variety of memory card formats, from the hulking old CompactFlash (CF) to the exceedingly tiny microSD - nearly all of which can still be found in shops. The variety of cards available for purchase can bewilder even those who aren't altogether new to the game.

Here, then, is yet another sort of memory card, the SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) card. It's a definite improvement over the SD cards it sort of supersedes; that sort can handle only up to 2GB of data, which isn't very much these days. The new cards are good for a whopping 32 GB (which in and of itself should be more than enough to make this sort of memory card stand out). Unfortunately, though, SDHC cards will only work with card readers compatible with the FAT-32 format; the older sort run on the FAT-16 format.