It's a secret for nobody that Olympus is getting ready to unveil its first Micro FourThird camera this month. Olympus and Panasonic announced the new format last summer, but until now only Panasonic had released two new camera models using the technology - the G1 and GH1. The Micro FourThird system uses a smaller sensor (17.3x13mm) than in other cameras, achieving the gains in compactness by doing away with a mirror box and optical viewfinder. The size has also been reduced with a six-millimetre smaller lens mount.

Olympus has been pretty quiet over the past year about how it will use the technology in its cameras. We've seen one prototype (here) back in September last year. However, this is about to change in the next couple of weeks. Olympus has invited photography journalists and editors from all over Europe for a special event in Berlin on 15 and 16 June.

And judging from the invitation sent to journalists, Olympus is going all retro on us (that's a good thing in our books), putting a lot of emphasis on black-and-white photography. This would seem to fit with the intense focus on the Olympus PEN we've seen coming from the imaging company over the past couple of weeks (more on this here).

Here are the scans of the invitation:

And, Olympus has also emailed journalists with some shots of previous PEN cameras, released in the 70s and 80s. Here are a couple: