a little bit of everything…

Tour Saint Jacques Paris from Pier-Yves Menkhoff Films on Vimeo.

New keystoning tilt/shift effect test at Evenstarphotography.ca.
Keystoning test at DC.watch.
E-PL7 test at DC.watch.
Panasonic LX7 patent at Freepatentsonline.
GH4 firmware update info by Newsshooter.
Panasonic 35-100mm f/4.0 lens patent at Egami.
Podcast all about mirrorless photography by Jamie McDonald.
Blackmagic Camera Utility 1.9.7 firmware update.

Sebastian: Apertus° and Magic Lantern join forces to develop AXIOM Beta: http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=11787.0 and https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/axiom-beta-the-first-open-digital-cinema-camera/x/5022798#activity

Quite cool Panasonic patent discloses a variable focal length optical viewfinder! Attacks last DSLR “advantage”.

Bildschirmfoto 2014-10-08 um 16.34.47

One of the remaining BIG advantages of DSLR camera over Mirrorless cameras is that you can frame your images through an optical viewfinder. It’s simply more “connecting” than watching through an electronic viewfinder. Well, it looks like Panasonic will soon eliminate that last DSLR advantage!

The image on top is quite complex but the idea behind it is simple: Panasonic patented an optical viewfinder which actually changes focal length in sync with any Micro Four Thirds lens! For example the optical viewfinder shows an 20mm focal length when you sue it along the 20mm pancake or 42,5mm focal length when you use the Leica Nocticron. And it obvisouly would also sync with any zoom lens too! It would become the first universal useable and variable optical viewfinder for any current digital mirrorless system. And it basically woudl do a similar job of an Optical viewfinder you usually have on a DSLR:

optical_viewfinder

Like you see th optical viewfinder zooms into the subject just like a real zoom lens. The official technical presentation from Panasonic says:

An optical viewfinder is configured to be attached to a camera body with an interchangeable lens. The optical viewfinder includes: a Keplerian viewfinder optical system 301 including a scalable objective lens group 330; a stepping motor 305 configured to drive the objective lens group 330 along an optical axis; and a control circuit configured to control driving of the stepping motor 305 based on a result of detection by a PI 306. When a variable focal length lens (an interchangeable lens) is attached to a camera body, the control circuit controls driving of the stepping motor 305 in accordance with a focal length of the variable focal length lens and displays at least a photographing frame on an EVF panel 307.

I love that!

Would you find such an optical viewfinder (external or built-in) useful?

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Note: Please be nice and link back to 43rumors if you repost that news. I spent half a day to find that patent :)

Kodak 8 years ago and Kodak now (From funny-sad ad to funny-sad K-S1).

Eight years ago Kodak launched that Ad to promise to deliver a digital revolution. It’s a funny-strange video to see now that you know that the exact opposite of what they said here happened :(
And what remains from them now is that new Micro Four Thirds camera from JK-Imaging and rebranded as Kodak. By the way it’s in Stock here now:
[shoplink 48726 ebay]Black S-1 with kit lens (Click here)[/shoplink].
[shoplink 48727 ebay]White S-1 with kit lens (Click here)[/shoplink].
[shoplink 48728 ebay]Black S-1 with double kit lens (Click here)[/shoplink].
[shoplink 48729 ebay]Black S-1 with double kit lens (Click here)[/shoplink].

via PetaPixel.

Panasonic predicts mirrorless to take 34% of the system camera market by 2016.

panasonic

How does Panasonic see the future mirrorless market? At an event in Japan Panasonic projected that slide showing that by end of 2016 mirrorless cameras should increase up to 34% of the overall system camera market (via MirrorlessRumors). DSLR will still keep 66% of the market.

One more news: Cipa published the August shipment data and you can see the nice graphs as usual at Personal-View. There is no big news but mirrorless keeps growing slowly.