Egami spotted a new Olympus patent describing a Lens Reversing Ring you can put on front of your MFT lens (just like a filter). This will allow you to shoot macros on all(?) MFT lenses. Something similar has been already be made by Nikon with the Nikon BR-2A. But the Olympus patent describes a more high quality variation that should get rid of the issues coming along such an adapter (chromatic aberrations and so on).

Don’t know if this is something I would buy but I am not a macro shooter :)

Yosemite: Sun, Showers, Snow 4K from Stephen Nguyen on Vimeo.

250 Euro off on that E-M5 with Nokton bundle by [shoplink 46500 ebay]FotoMundus Germany (Click here)[/shoplink].
MFT 42.5 mm/45 mm ‘lens battle’ at PixelMania.
New GM1 14-42mm lens cap showed at DC.watch.
GH4 Stills B&W at Outbackphoto.

Frederik: “I have tested the GH4 electronic shutter, and it is clearly using only a 10 bit readout, just like the GM1. This causes more noise in the shadows, and a smaller effective dynamic range. See the test here: http://m43photo.blogspot.com/2014/06/gh4-shutters.html”

Jasiek: “Just wanted to share a music video I shot entirely on GH3 with 12-35 and 25/1.4 https://vimeo.com/97426862”

Thomas: “Oly E-M1 Street-Fotograf Thomas Leuthard at work: http://youtu.be/_k415z19F1M”

Do you really need the new 4K GH4 camera to shoot a movie for BBC? Nope! The video on top has been shot by BBC with an “Old” Panasonic GH2. Great video!

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Thanks John and Ivar for sharing!

CIPA mirrorless shipment data from Japanese companies. Image courtesy Personal View.

The Japanese CIPA and the German GFK agency shared some interesting new data about the worldwide digital camera market. And finally we see some slow but continuous growth in the mirrorless market:

1) CIPA
CIPA (data can be seen here) shared the Japanese camera shipment numbers. And as usual Personal View did a great job summing them in graphs (can be seen here).
The interesting data here is that in the period January-April 2014 mirrorless system camera shipments growth by 16% while DSLR shipments did fell by 11%

Mirrorless camera sales are increasing almost everywhere (Source GFK at MirrorlessRumors).

2) GFK
The German agency that works in partnership with the Photokina organizers shared plenty of surprisingly positive data (more about it at Mirrorlessrumors). While it’s true that the budget compact camera is shrinking the premium market increased. And with premium we mean, premium DSLR, premium mirrorless and premium fixed lens compact cameras. And there is where companies have higher profit margins. See graph below:

Camera unit sales dropped by 25% but revenue is increasing.

Well, this could be a good news for Panasonic and Olympus. Both companies are now focusing their efforts on mirrorless cameras. And and as we heard many times now their goal is to create more “premium” mirrorless cameras and premium “compact fixed lens cameras”. As you know Panasonic latest financial reports shows they are recovering very well from the losses they had the previous year while Olympus is expected to have a break even during the current fiscal year.

Let’s see what kind of “premium” stuff will be announced by both companies at Photokina…

UPDATE: There was some confusion on the translation. Sorry about it. Here is the correct news: Panasonic manager Inoue announced in an interview at Imaging Resource that a planned telephoto zoom lens will NOT be released this year and it has been removed from the roadmap. The 150mm f/2.8 is still (!) on roadmap although it sounds like it could be delayed a bit. Inoue says:

“Yes, we had been considering, but looking at the overall situation, what it would take for development and what sales there would be, we decided to cancel the long telephoto zoom. We had already released 150mm, but for the zoom, we are very sorry, but this was our decision.”

And he also confessed that:

We are still considering the lens roadmap here [in Japan]

For now Panasonic decided to focus on shorter focal lengths and on lenses designed for the GM line. I am not sure if this is a smart decision. What do you think?