I’ve been an Olympus shooter since pre-digital days and have stuck with their dSLRs since the Olympus E-10. And in truth, overall I’ve been happy with my Olympus cameras. That remains true of my current Olympus E-3, their “flagship” dSLR.

If I’m being honest, my main complaint with my current gear of choice is the high ISO performance. Shooting in low-light without a flash using the E-3 is tough. The 4/3 sensor system just isn’t optimum for this scenario and you wind up fighting noise in the resulting images. I can get photos I’m happy with but it requires a great deal of time consuming post-processing. Time I’d rather use shooting photos instead of editing them!

Olympus does have newer, better sensors in several of their new mid-level dSLRs and in the new micro-4/3rd line of cameras, but unfortunately Olympus has a bad habit of getting distracted by the consumer market and ignoring working professionals that use their camera gear. There are features in the flagship, like weather sealing, that are absolutely critical to me as a photojournalist working in Seattle!

While we’ve seen innovation from Olympus in their lower end models, we’ve gone years without a hint of a new professional model that incorporates all of those innovations in a single body with features like weather-sealing that I need. And it’s getting tough seeing the strides that Nikon and Canon are making and not start to feel that maybe the grass is a bit greener elsewhere.

The new rumor is that an E-3 replacement will be announced before the end of this year. I’m trying to tell myself that the smart thing to do is give the Olympus marketing arm the benefit of the doubt and wait and see what they deliver. The problem is we’ve heard this rumor for the last two years and nothing much has come of it that is of use to me.

In the interim, I ditched my last Olympus point-and-shoot walking around camera and replaced it with a Canon S90. So far the little camera has blown me away. There are times I’d rather shoot with it than my big camera and that’s got me thinking. If this little pocket-sized device is so fantastic, how good would one of the Canon professional dSLR systems be?

So do I wait patiently (OK, not so patiently) to see what, if anything, Olympus produces? Or do I start planning an exodus to a new Canon camera system? A Canon EOS 7D? A Canon EOS 5D Mk II? Decisions, decisions!