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Why would a company cease implementing the feature? To promote the sales of the SLR cameras? Or am I being cynical?

In my experience camera manufacturers still pull the kind of stunts that would get a manufacturer laughed out of many other markets. My Olympus (and it is indeed more than a year old: I've had mine for over a year) has a completely non-standard USB connector that looks like mini-B but isn't, and a non-standard video out connector, forcing you to use Olympus cables, plus it disables the Panorama feature if it detects a non-Olympus-branded XD card, meanwhile they advertise Olympus XD cards as "with Panorama feature". Even phone companies could learn about lock-in from these guys.

Peter