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Michael Brecker, Pat Metheny, Joey Calderazzo, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette: "Midnight Voyage" (1997)

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Captain Magic6/24/2020 5:18:13 am PDT

For all you current/past shutterbugs, it’s not good news:
Engadget: Olympus is giving up on cameras

It’ll be acquired by the company that bought Sony’s VAIO division

Despite denying persistent rumors that it would exit the camera business, Olympus is doing exactly that. The company has announced that will sell its camera business to Japan Industrial Partners (JIP), the same company that purchased Sony’s VAIO PC division (via The Verge). Olympus will now focus on its much larger business supplying industrial and medical imaging equipment.

Olympus said it improved cost structure, focused on high-profit cameras and lenses and took other steps to “cope with the extremely severe digital camera market.” Despite those efforts, however, the company said it “recorded operating losses for three consecutive fiscal years up to the term ended in March 2020.” It likely didn’t help that the company was rocked by a $1.7 billion accounting scandal in 2013.

It’s unclear how this might affect owners of Olympus mirrorless cameras like the flagship O-MD E-M1 Mark III. JIP plans to streamline the business as it did with VAIO to make it “more compact, efficient and agile,” according to Olympus. It will also sell the existing camera models and develop new ones, so it would presumably support current Olympus owners. Beyond that, we don’t know what JIP plans to do with Olympus, and it didn’t exactly bring Sony’s former VAIO division to greatness.

Unless JIP makes new cameras and lenses, you can kiss Micro Four-Thirds goodbye.