Revealed: Sony manager confess that back in 2008 they were close to join the MFT system!
Nikkei Business has published an interview with Mr. Shigeki Ishizuka, Vice Chairman of the Sony Group, looking back on the company’s digital camera trajectory. And he confessed that back in late 2008 they were close to join the MFT system:
- Around 2007, the Micro Four Thirds camp asked me if I wanted to join the family.
- It was the fall of 2008. We had a brainstorming session for the medium-term plan for the next three years. Of course, Sony’s interchangeable-lens cameras would have to be made smaller and mirrorless. The question was, what kind of system should be used? One option was: “Let’s go Micro Four Thirds”. Option two was: “Let’s shift to mirrorless while maintaining the assets and brand of α, and do a miniaturized version.” I had a few other ideas, but these two were the most realistic.
- “If you do it with Micro Four Thirds, it will definitely be smaller,”. But if we would have done that, we would have been completely on the same playing field as your competitors. And we would have wasted all α assets from Konica Minolta. So we decided it was better to develop an in-house mirrorless solution. That is the “E-mount” that continues to this day.
- To be honest, at the time I thought the mirrorless idea was to make a small camera that could fit in a pocket and was aimed at general consumers. That’s why I didn’t intend to create a full lineup of lenses, only the standard series.
- And no, I didn’t think at that moment that mirrorless would go Full Frame.
Really interesting!
via Digicameinfo
Press text: Development of organic CMOS image sensor technology that achieves excellent color reproduction under all types of light sources
Panasonic Japan issued the following press text (google translated):
Development of organic CMOS image sensor technology that achieves excellent color reproduction under all types of light sources
Panasonic Holdings Co., Ltd. has developed excellent color reproduction technology that suppresses color mixture by thinning the photoelectric conversion layer using the high light absorption rate of the organic film and by using electrical pixel separation technology. In this technology, the organic thin film that performs photoelectric conversion and the circuit that stores and reads out electric charge are completely independent of each other. This unique layered structure reduces the sensitivity of each pixel in green, red, and blue in wavelength regions outside the target range. Since it can achieve spectral characteristics with low color mixing, accurate color reproduction is possible regardless of the type of light source.
New TopazVideo AI update
Topaz announced the new Video AI version (3.1.9) and it has a $50 discount that runs til March 31. A list of improvements can be read on this blog post. And here is a video showing home much it improved:
