DPReview has an interview with the people at Esquisse. Esquisse is the French word for sketch, and a French startup company whose goal is to design a new pocketable camera with interchangeable lenses, trying to fill a void left by Panasonic and Olympus. Why these two? Because Esquisse are designing a micro 4/3 camera which make sense given the range of high-quality and reasonably priced lenses.
Currently in the early stages, the design seems to focus on having control accessible at your fingertips. The four person team is trying to strike the right balance with the features. And their goal is to build it in “public” i.e. to have update and get feedback from outside. At the moment the design feature an EVF, a built-in 256GB memory (a trend I do not like), words of a built-in battery (WAT?), a touchscreen and a few knobs. Nothing ground breaking but you don’t need to, to make a better tool — albeit a few bad trends. No words on what they envision for the software, since it is a digital camera this is not even a question, but I just hope they go the Leica M9 route rather than the Pixii-you-need-a-phone-app route.
Physical size is always a concern to me. The Fujifilm X-M5 feels a bit small in my hands and I did try the Panasonic GM-1 that felt too small, but the esquisse having an EVF looks promising.
Esquisse also state they don’t want to crowdfund it until they have something physical, if they even fund this way.
We’ll see, it could just end like it started.
Another French designed camera is Pixii which now exist as a full-frame M compatible camera. So why not a second French camera.