KTF-Turbo posted many new image samples of the SOnnetar 25mm f/1.1 Micro Four Thirds lens: http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/ktf_turbo/28265046.html. As you can see the image quality drmatically increases at f/1.4 aperture. F71.1 has a creamy effect and may be used for emrgency (or creative) reaosns only. I think it’s an impressive performance for such a tiny lens.
Reminder: The designer of the lens is designer Mr. Miyazaki. He is the creator of the well known [shoplink 29386 ebay]Leica Triplet lenses (here on eBay)[/shoplink] and already made a Sonnetar lens for [shoplink 29387 ebay]Pentax Q mount which costs $650 on eBay (Click here)[/shoplink]
Robin Wong (Click here) finalized his long and very discussed Olympus E-M5 review. No matter how much you like Robin work, you should give him a nice credit for doing a job that none of the big websites has done! In short what he liked about the E-M5 is the image quality, the 5 axis IS and the handling. But he also listed some smaller issues. Interestingly the viewfinder gets foggy when shooting in rainy conditions, 3D tracking misses a lot of focus points and the electronic viewfinder still is not on par with the “real light” experience of the optical viewfinder.
Meantime Damian MCGilliCuddy had to return the [shoplink 29074]Olympus E-M5[/shoplink] to Olympus but he now keeps shooting some nude portraits with the [shoplink 18844]Olympus E-PL2[/shoplink] (Click here to see his pictures here). Those are nice shots taken with the supertiny [shoplink 14798]17mm f/2.8[/shoplink] and the super good and cheap priced [shoplink 23577]45mm f/1.8[/shoplink] lens. Amazing what you can do with these two little cheap lenses!
If the price wouldn’t be that high this would certainly be the ONE lens I would always use on my Olympus E-P1 and Panasonic GH2. Today Cosina announced that the new Nokton 17.5mm f/0.95 lens will start shipping from April 29th (via DC.watch). The lens sale shipment was due for March but because of an exceptional high preorder demand the shipment had to be postponed! I am surprised to hear that the lens had such a high demand. The price is high (120,000 yen or 1.299 Euro), currently no website did post any image samples, there is no preview, and even bigger stores are not offering any preorder option. In fact there is zero Marketing around that lens! My guess is that the lens promotion is ongoing “underground” at the very basic Internet user level. The specs are amazing, Cosina is also known for making good quality lenses. Maybe that’s enough to push you guys to buy the lens.
The only two image samples that I found on the Internet are on Flickr (Click here) and (Click here). Europenas can preorer the lens at [shoplink 29368 ebay]Digitalhandel (Click here)[/shoplink] and [shoplink 29367 ebay]Bayern Fotoversand (Click here)[/shoplink].
P.S.:A cheaper alternative is the [shoplink 29238 ebay]Schneider 17mm f/0.95 (Click here to see it on ebay)[/shoplink] C-mount lens.
For seven months now we are waiting for Panasonic’s official 12-35mm X lens release. We only saw prototype versions during the latest shows. Today a mysterious forum user from Mobile01 (Click here) posted a picture of a dissembled 12-35mm X lens. He didn’t unveil any info about the price and official release of the lens. All we know is that it has a constant f/2.8 aperture, a 0,25m close focus distance, Power O.I.S. and weather sealing. Panasonic didn’t go for a constant f/2.0 aperture because they wanted to keep a reasonable size. The [shoplink 25320 ebay]Olympus 14-35mm f/2.0 (here on eBay)[/shoplink] is indeed quite a big bigger.
And here is a mysterious part of the story: The same guy posted also the logo of Konica Minolta and said “it connects to the X lens picture“. Have no idea what he is referring to! Maybe some special feature of Konica is coming with the Panasonic lens? Do you have an idea what it could be?
Anyway, my guess (and hope) is that the lens will be officially announced right before the NAB show in April.
Canon first attempt to fight against the mirrorless world is represented by the fixed lens Canon G1X camera ($800 at Amazon).The camera uses a Four Thirds ratio sensor that is just a tiny bit bigger than our Panasonic/Olympus Four Thirds sensors. Being used to compare our m43 image quality with the larger APS-C sensor I thought it might be interesting to see how the image quality of the two almost equal sized sensor would be (18.7 x 14mm vs. 17.3 x 13mm)
DCfever (Click here) compared the JPEG quality of the Canon with the one of the [shoplink 26836]Panasonic GX1[/shoplink]. Please notice that Panasonic has an average JPEG engine while Canon is known to be much better. A RAW image comparison would probably show a more “real” sensor performance. The JPEG comparison show a slight advantage of the Canon at Low ISO while at High ISO the difference is less pronounced. I think you want see any difference when looking on real printed images.
The Canon G1X is a very strange concept I can’t fell in love with. It will be much more interesting to see if Canon will launch their new interchangeable lens mirrorless system with exactly the same sensor size of the G1X! …P.S.: Don’t even think Canon would join the m43 system, that’s impossible…or not? :)
Four Thirds User (Click here) tested the fps speed of the E-M5. The good news is that the E-M5 actually shoots 10fps instead of the indicated 9fps on all four tested cards: “Olympus also told us that IS would slow the shooting rate down, which it clearly didn’t. Curiously, two of the higher-specification cards, the Lexar Pro and Kingston XX Ultimate, although they shot 12 frames in the sequence, the last frame took twice as long to register as the previous one, so we excluded it, only counting the 11.”
This has to be a marketing trick from Olympus to get positive feedback from reviews ;) Thanks FourThirdsUser for sharing that interesting test!
Some more E-M5 bits:
The latest Robin Wong E-M5 review created a lot of buzz and Robin clarified a couple of things on his blog (Click here). P.S: Personal message for Robin: You are doing a great job! Don’t care too much about negative or non sense critics! It’s the price you pay for the popularity ;) Gabrielle Motola contacted me yesterday because you bad 43rumors readers made crash her website :) She now managed to restore it! Seriously speaking, she was happy you visited the blog ;)
One more fashion image taken with the E-M5 at Damian Mcgillicuddy (Click here). No nude pic that time ;)
