The Oly camera is pretty much a new camera, didn't come out 'til December of last year. I suspect at the very least Ikelite has to sit back and wait to see if it's going to sell enough to justify even making a housing. The Oly housings only been out a couple months, I'm sure they're peeking at it.
My guess is there may be something more at play too. In the past Ikelite used to essentially make each housing for each camera on demand... a new camera comes out and they could take measurements and start cutting acryllic sheet and making jigs for the bends and such, they're essentially making every housing one at a time out of several pieces of plastic... Lately we're seeing a bunch of injection molded or vacumn formed housings (I'm not up on the process, gotta as a mold maker how it's done) out of Ikelite on the smaller cameras. Molds are very expensive, we're talking probably 10s of thousands just to make the mold for their small camera, once you've got it made though the camera housings now become cheap to build, just gotta sell enough to make the initial investment worthwhile. My guess is the Pen cameras are small enough, and with Panasonic having their own small version of an interchangeable lens camera, Nikon answering they're coming out with something maybe late this year, Sony coming out with the NEX camera and such, that Ikelite is now considering whether it's going to try to come up with an intermediate sized molded housing which could be converted to use on several cameras. At which point they need to decide if they're taking the chance that camera manufacturers are committed to the format and the body styles they've got now. There's a big photo show in September (I think) that will go a long way in telling what's coming from the camera manufacturers in the next year or so... wouldn't surprise me if Ikelite is waiting for that to judge which way to go on the housings. Call it a crazy guess.
At any rate, who knows how tied up Ikelite is with keeping up with demand on other cameras, there's lots out there, and the Oly Pen may not be the biggest need to fill just yet. I sure hope they get one out there fairly soon.
so ikelite better hurry up and make one. I have two ikelite digital strobes and I can't wait to use it on a E-PL1
