Robert Collins

7 hours ago, jonpais said:

teardown

Wouldnt be at all surprised if this is not an identical part to the one in the A7riii. Made by Nidec Copal. 

Nikon F mount glass with FTZ adapter not great for stills....

10 minutes ago, androidlad said:

We are talking about a specific individual on Weibo. She's the one who debunked the fake rumours including the 15.4MP sensor and A7000.

https://www.weibo.com/KazuoHiraiSONY

She's also the first one to (implicitly) point out that X-T3 uses a Sony sensor.

#QAnon #WWGOWGA

1 minute ago, androidlad said:

All of these are likely to be true, as it came from a Japanese semiconductor engineer who's involved in the development.

We'll see soon.

Or presumably an 'EX' Japanese semiconductor engineer who involved in the development!!

On 10/6/2018 at 11:14 PM, Danyyyel said:

You do understand that with the FTZ adapter, you have all the modern Nikon lens (the last 10-20 years) which work natively on the z series camera. We are not talking about lens that won't focus, meter etc. but work as good with fast focus etc. This already makes the Z cameras have a big advantage in terms of lens compared to any Sony. Now ad the Sigma's which all work very well on the Z and some Tamron's. I am sure Tamron will be working to make sure all their lens work. Some like the 24-70mm is working. Then you have all the lens that can be adapted, we already saw a lot of adapter coming on.

https://nikonrumors.com/2018/09/24/12-novoflex-lens-adapters-for-nikon-z-mirrorless-camera-officially-announced.aspx/

I wouldnt be that optimistic about F mount lens via the FTZ adapter because the lens dont have the built in stepper motors needed for cdaf.

To quote Thom Hogan.

 In the continuous autofocus modes the Z7 isn’t a D850. Or even a D7500. This is particularly true with lenses on the FTZ adapter, which forces the camera to always use phase detect. In my initial opinion, the Z7 is substantively behind where the Sony A7Rm3 is for continuous autofocus sequences of objects moving towards you (even at a diagonal). 

My guess is that F mount users will have to eventually switch over to S lenses if they want to take advantage of the Z mounts dual cdaf/pdaf focusing system for 'fast' and 'accurate' focusing.

50 minutes ago, BTM_Pix said:

A lot of it is laughably blatant.

Whatever happened to subtly and subliminally pushing your brand at people?

Anyway, I'm just going to have this cup of coffee and watch this develop with a keen interest.

Yep..... bring back Ashton Kutcher.....

Interesting topic.

I remember a little while back a 'new poster' wrote a post about a DJI drone - great drone, really fantastic, you can buy one here.

Now when you buy a DJI drone, you register your drone with DJI. And I suspect that 'anyone' who registers with DJI gets approached to be an affiliate. (I certainly did.) And the affiliate plan is reasonably attractive - 4% of any purchase through your affiliate link. Admittedly I cant be bothered but I bet others find the offer potentially attractive (say if you are a student.)

So maybe what you are seeing is not 'plants'. Camera companies are just spending their marketing dollars differently. Bribing youtubers with jamborees and early  access to new product. And mobilizing their customer base through affiliate links.[

6 hours ago, noone said:

I still wish all the manufacturers put in a high quality digital VARIABLE digital zoom like Sony does with Clear Image zoom.

M43 cameras give their teleconverter modes but they are not variable, just fixed at certain magnifications so can only be used on the fly with zoom lenses really.

With Sony and clear zoom, ANY lens becomes a zoom including super fast lenses and exotics like tilt shift lenses.

Given how good some primes for mirrorless have become, I can imagine if some of the new FF mirrorless like the Nikon Z's or Canon R  would allow something similar that would make them cheaper (that 35 1.8 Nikon Z for instance).

It isn't like they can not do it- I recently had an old small Panasonic consumer camcorder that had a 3500x digital zoom (though that was not great quality).

This is a repost of my old Canon FD 24 1.4 L used as a 2x zoom.      This is hand held with an unstabilized camera and just to give an idea but it is at 1.4 FF so would need a 12-24 f0.75 zoom in M43 or a 16-36 f1 with most APSC cameras.       Would love to do new ones but am without a camera currently.

One other advantage of clear zoom is that it lets you zoom in and out while using it on many gimbals (including relatively in expensive ones.)

2 hours ago, Yurolov said:

Which lenses will you use if you are using canon for birding? Full frame emount are prohibitively expensive to be used on a crop sensor camera.  

A good budget option for birding on Sony APSC is adapting a Canon 400 5.6 prime. It is very sharp and sells second hand for about US$800. It is relatively cheap because it doesnt have OIS but obviously you can benefit from ibis with the Sony.

38 minutes ago, jonpais said:

Didn’t Sony announce something like a dozen lenses to be released in the next year?

It will be interesting to see whether some of these are E as opposed to FE (Sony has only released one E mount lens in the past 5 years) and there is a shortage of quality E mount glass.

I think the problem for Sony with the A7000 is that they have to leave a video feature (or two) on the table for the A7siii. 

5 minutes ago, hoodlum said:

I have been wondering when we would see a stacked sensor in something larger than the RX series.  I wonder if Sony will preserve this tech for their own cameras like they have done with the RX series.

I assume so. Sony has quite a long history of showcasing its best sensor tech exclusively in their own cameras. It obviously eventually filters down to their clients. Here's a quote from Sony.

When we make sensors we put them in several categories. [At any given time] one category of sensors is reserved purely for Sony cameras - we don’t sell them to other companies. Like the sensor in the A7S. But once we’ve enjoyed this advantage we might sell them on later, after some time has passed. This is the second category. The third category of sensors is completely generic - the sensors are created for use internally and to sell externally, to anybody. China or Taiwan or wherever.

I would guess that this camera will use Sony's 'stacked CMOS' tech. This will allow a sensor readout at least as fast as 1/160 which will mean for the photographer silent shooting of at least 20fps with no noticeable rolling shutter. This is the same tech as in the A9 and probably why it is being referred to as the 'mini A9' This would be great for wild life shooters. I assume that this tech will also be applied to video (unlike the A9) so there would be virtually no rolling shutter in video.

5 hours ago, Trek of Joy said:

In a 2-3 years everyone outside of Pentax will be heavily into mirrorless, in a declining market some will really feel the pinch. IMO Fuji (when Instax hits the saturation point and sales fall off a cliff) and Olympus will be hit hardest since stills shooters are still the main driving force behind high end cameras - and the IQ just isn't at FF levels. That combined with the fact top end m43 pricing is moving into FF territory, its easy to see why the a7III has been such a runaway success.

I actually think Fuji is positioned to do very well. APSC ILCs currently make up about 75% of ILC sales and Fuji is the only company that has a focused strategy and complete system in this format. Canon, Nikon and Sony seem to give scant regard to this format and are busy chasing the 'pro' FF market.

In terms of image quality, yes you can get better image quality with FF but only if you are prepared to go for heavy and very expensive 2.8 zooms and 1.4 primes, a route many people dont want to go down.

To understand Olympus's position you have to go back and look in recent history.

1) In 2008 its digital imaging was profitable and had annual sales of US$3bn. In the following 10 years sales have shrunk 85% to US$550m and the imaging division has lost money in 9 out of the 10 years.

2) For the current year Olympus forecasts a loss of US$70m which equates to US$150 on every ILC it sells.

3) So realistically management cant go to shareholders and say - we started the 43 format, lost money and closed it down - we started the M43 format and lost money. But we have a great idea - lets get into FF and directly compete with Nikon, Sony and Canon.

So where does this leave them? Well they can stick with M43 and hope it comes good. But Panasonic seems to be looking elsewhere (whether that is a good idea is another question)? (I am not really sure that Olympus has much faith - they have released 3 cameras in the last 2 years.) So they could exit the business altogether. 

Alternatively, they could turn themselves into being purely a lens manufacturer (more along the lines of Zeiss (cough, cough)) for existing mounts. This is where their value added/expertise really lies(and has synergy with their highly successful medical optics business. They could eradicate their massive (relative to the size of the business) sales, marketing, administration and service overhead of their camera business. Furthermore, the industry seems to have a very large amount of new mounts desperately short of native glass.

Now, of course, some of these new mounts are fairly proprietary but there is nothing to say that Olympus couldnt design and produce lenses for other brands (and already might do as far as I know.) All conjecture but I dont see an Olympus FF mount on the horizon.

33 minutes ago, tekeela said:

I was thinking about getting the 12-100 as my first lens along with the P4k. What is the net effect of this distortion? Worse image quality?

Purists have always been pretty animated about lens distortion. Obviously any lens distortion with a film camera would show up in the print. With a DSLR the distortion would be evident in the viewfinder but could be corrected. With a mirrorless you can correct the distortion in both the viewfinder (with lens profiles) and the image (in camera or in post.) 

Obviously software correction of optical distortion requires a small degree of stretching of the underlying pixels which equates to some loss of image quality but it is relatively minor. I feel it is actually an advantage of mirrorless that you can effectively use both software and optical solutions to correct distortion allowing cheaper and lighter lenses (the FE 28 2 is a good example). Pretty much any zoom like an M43 12-100 or FE 24-105 will tend to have quite a lot of distortion at the wide end.

After Effects is the obvious choice. The easiest way to go about this is to buy a stock After Effects project template, take it into After Effects and then customizing it to fit your own vision, logos and video.

Here is an example....

https://s3.envato.com/h264-video-previews/492678.mp4

...but there are literally thousands to choose from.

You would have to be pretty brave, skilled and have a lot of time to do it yourself in After Effects from scratch.

I have always found this guy very reliable when it comes to Mavic videos, so I think this one is worth a look....

Word of caution: He is flogging some neat video noise profiles and some D Log LUTs for the Mavic 2, so if you find that sort of thing irritating in youtube videos, it is best avoided...

4 hours ago, anonim said:

Actually, I've found all content of presentation in general more serious - as little bit shameless: actually showing anything but achiеvable possible plan. Even about future codec their words are shamelessly indeterminate: "codecs will be best possible for video work"... i. e. clearly with idea to wait and see what other manufacturers will do and than try to surpass their offer. Probably having better cooling know-how and codec-science knowledge in sleeves by which could beat concurrency, I think that Panasonic makes step further in a cheap (and not just a bit dirty) game of delaying, aka stealing time as more and more main business strategy...

What is ugly to me is that Panasonic indeed can - as it looks like - make, for example 24-105 lens with f4 , f2.8, maybe even spectacular f2 - but decision again depends solely of selling need - as they come out with m43 10-25 f1.7 lens only just at the moment when m43 system selling seems jeopardized... It has to be tolerated, but lesser from company that earlier had idea of "serving to community with best possible tools" as one of the main marketing motto... What a difference in comparison to proudly disclosure announce of GH5 with road map...

Of course, all such business background procrastinated estimations are logical and even expected, but know they are made so brutally obvious that looks to me very unattractive - even if there's no any doubt that Panasonic easily could make the best and most advance offering.  

 

What struck me most about the presentation was how 'photography centric' it was. It was 95% about photography. The presentation was titled 'Lumix - changing photography'. There were 3 Lumix brand ambassadors - all of them photographers. When the slide with the two cameras came up - the high resolution camera didnt even mention video....

My guess is that their 'photographer brand ambassadors' made it clear to Panasonic that an M43 sized sensor simply doesnt cut it in the professional 'photography' market and that this is a market that they feel they need to be in (and I suspect the G9 hasnt sold well). So Panasonic are going FF mainly to try and capture the pro photography market. Comments about 'best possible codec' are entirely meaning less and cant be conflated into 'internal raw recording' - noone is going to say that they plan to have a 'crummy video codec.'

9 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

It's interesting that it has that angled grip like the Sigma DP Quattros. 

I noticed it got the usual losing their shit reaction from commenters on DPReview who'd never buy it anyway.

Which is fast becoming my barometer of what might be interesting to take a look at.

Except that Zenith branded M.

I'm with them on that one.

The flash shoe is designed for Sigma flashes too.

The 'mini medium format' of Fuji GFX is a bit of a dead end or very niche (it is mostly attractive to photographers who like to shoot a 1:1 aspect ratio.)

The reason is fairly simple - the sensor size is simply too 'small' to make a meaningful difference relative to full frame.

mini medium format = 44 x 33mm

FF = 36 x 24mm

For people who shoot landscape the horizantal, the difference between the two sensors is a little over 20% (44 v 36). So the light gathering difference is less than half a stop and the resolution difference 20%. This is much less than FF v APSC and APSC v M43. (And is virtually a rounding error in the greater scheme of things.)

31 minutes ago, jonpais said:

None of the above jibes with reality as I see it.

First, I highly doubt Fuji even considered for a second the NX1 when designing the X-T3, given that Samsung is no longer in the camera business, haven't been for quite some time.

Second, I don't see Fuji dropping APS-C for medium format ever. 

And my guess is the X-T3 has got a Sony sensor, not Samsung.

Everything else aside, Fuji's got a sensational lens lineup, which would make it my very first choice when it comes to APS-C. The NX1 is a dead system. RIP

Same here. Although if you think about it, you dont have much of a choice. Fuji is the ONLY company that is fully committed to APSC. Every other company is trying to flog FF, while virtually ignoring their APSC system. Seems strange as APSC is by far the most popular format (and arguably the most practical for most people.)

21 minutes ago, wolf33d said:

This is what I am talking about. When I say this japanese industry does not innovate at all. 

Bigger screen, ssd, integrated lightroom and direct share. This should be in our mirrorless cameras for 2 years. 
No they will keep the same button layout and design and screen as 10y ago. 

This camera will be probably niche and expensive, but bravo Zeiss. 

Imagine this in an LX100

22 hours ago, gt3rs said:

Is this picture supposed to be a good example? Imo is not that great.. but I don't know the conditions that it was taken... there is no detail on it... 

 

A somewhat similar picture form P4p (still not that great but better than the above):

 

I do agree with you here. Essentially @wolf33d has shot a high dynamic range photo in jpeg (and I think raised the shadows in post.)

This reflects a bit more what the sensor is capable of in stills - taken about 30 minutes ago - and certainly not as pretty as your guys photos.

The full sized file (2 shot panorama) can be downloaded here....

https://1drv.ms/u/s!Arx347dcSG470WQBMzybeJo_3Yp0

(The full sized image might look a little oversharpened at 1:1 but I did that in post.)

I think that camera brands (apart from Fuji and Olympus) are really trying to 'push' FF onto consumers - 'FF is where serious photographers should be'. APSC seems to be somewhat orphaned (Sony E - one new lens in 5 years) (EF-M what future?) even though that is where the majority of the demand is.

Even Panasonic is getting in on the act. I love this back-handed compliment to M43 from Panasonic reported by DPR ' Panasonic stressed that it will continue to sell and develop the Micro Four Thirds system in parallel with its L-mount system, which will be targeted at high-end users.'

The Laowa 10-18 FE lens looks very interesting and supposedly they have production copies at Photokina.

The Zeiss full frame compact gets announced tomorrow. Definitely worth a hands on if you get the chance.

I am interested in Tamron's future mirrorless plans