NEX-7 announcement in three months time?

[KevinBarrett]

And I should hope that a Carl Zeiss prime lens, even for the E-mount, would have both a distance scale and depth of field markings.

[bossel]

So I am committed to NEX, but I need something like this device coupled with faster AF/AE and more dedicated E-mount lenses fielding high IQ to handle 24Mp.

I also want faster AF and more lenses, but don't need 24mp. Maybe thay can make a cut down NEX7 with 16mp and maybe les fps (like A900 vs A850).

[alphaomega]

Bossel, I really do not need 24 Mp either. 16Mp would do fine for me. Problem: if the next generation of NEX, incorporating an EVF only is available with 24Mp and AF/AE is greatly improved then I am stuck with 24Mp whether I need it or not. So I want lenses which cover my range (near enough 16 to 300mm in 35mm equivalent) that can do justice to 24Mp. Really, If Sony were a real camera company then they would see to that without any prompting. So all we need now is a confirmation from Sony as to what they are actually going to bring to the market. Frankly, I am not going to purchase another NEX unless there is a usable EVF and much faster AF/EA. I also want a greater selection of lenses.

[alphaomega]

So there is now a brief user review up on sonyalpharumors.com at SR5 level
which includes a bit about the NEX-7 http://www.sonyalpharumors.com/sr5-excl ... 50mm-lens/

Feels really nice in your hands and the built-in OLED viewfinder is a winner. It records video at 24p FX/PS 1080. The prototype photo is accurate! The controls do make a lot of sense when you know what all the buttons do.

Assuming the chap is on the right track we may be seeing a NEX-7 with OLED viewfinder built in, Alpha hotshoe, 24Mp and faster contrast detect than my NEX-5. I do hope it will also have the contact for Sony's microphone ECM-ALST1 I have just purchased for my A580. I don't think it will be cheap with these enhancements, but I might just buy it if some additional E-mount lenses become available. If this is rolling out as rumoured the real shortcomings with the E system will be lack of dedicated E mount lenses. Sorry, but I am not in the business of fiddling with old manual prime lenses or discontinued zooms. I need AF, AE and SSS.

[Kenneth Sky]

If this rumour is accurate, the NEX 7 will destroy the M9 sales. If you "must" have Leica lenses, just get an adapter & MF. In fact, Fuji X100 & micro 4/3 will have a hard time competing in that space. The only thing holding it back will be the lack of Sony lenses that are high quality and small/light.

[Dr. Harout]

If this rumour is accurate, the NEX 7 will destroy the M9 sales. If you "must" have Leica lenses, just get an adapter & MF. In fact, Fuji X100 & micro 4/3 will have a hard time competing in that space. The only thing holding it back will be the lack of Sony lenses that are high quality and small/light.

Seconded!

[douglasf13]

Bossel, I really do not need 24 Mp either. 16Mp would do fine for me. Problem: if the next generation of NEX, incorporating an EVF only is available with 24Mp and AF/AE is greatly improved then I am stuck with 24Mp whether I need it or not. So I want lenses which cover my range (near enough 16 to 300mm in 35mm equivalent) that can do justice to 24Mp. Really, If Sony were a real camera company then they would see to that without any prompting. So all we need now is a confirmation from Sony as to what they are actually going to bring to the market. Frankly, I am not going to purchase another NEX unless there is a usable EVF and much faster AF/EA. I also want a greater selection of lenses.

Oddly enough, I'm kind of feeling the opposite about it. I don't really need an EVF, because the nexviewer works great, and I prefer using manual lenses, so the main thing tempting me about the NEX-7 is the 24mp. At the size I print, I miss that resolution a little bit from my old A900.

[twm47099]

And I should hope that a Carl Zeiss prime lens, even for the E-mount, would have both a distance scale and depth of field markings.

Or at least a background defocus scale and a scale with a mountain and a flower icons.

tom

[Lonnie Utah]

I know that many of you folks follow SAR everyday. I'm surprised that nobody has said anything about today's postings, esp this!



The nex7 is looking better and better.

[pakodominguez]

I know that many of you folks follow SAR everyday. I'm surprised that nobody has said anything about today's postings, esp this!



The nex7 is looking better and better.

Yep: what is not looking that good is the "huge" 24mm f1.8 -I would love a compact SEL 24f2.8 instead. And a 70 to 100 macro.

[bfitzgerald]

It actually looks quite interesting!

Bit Volvo ish (boxy) but much more appealing than current NEX models.

[agorabasta]

Almost all the smallish adapted rangefinder lenses wider than about 35mm were having problems with edge/corner colour shifts and/or smearing when used with the old Nex5/3 bodies. I'm pretty sure it was caused by the poor design of the sensor toppings in those bodies.
So any new small wide lens design would have that very problem. And that must be the real reason why we had no such lenses made for the original Nex bodies.

Now the new C3 appears to have corrected much of that original problem. And if the Nex7 proves to work really well with the small wide rangefinder lenses, we really may expect that the new smaller high-performance lenses get finally released for the E-mount.

I'm very much sure that real reason for the current lack of such lenses is the inadequate design of the older Nex'es. We simply had no body good enough for the lens design effort. If the Nex7 really provides, such lenses are going to surface rather soon. If not, then - never, simply because it would be taking much too long to even continue waiting and hoping and the effort would be put elsewhere.

[WyldRage]

Almost all the smallish adapted rangefinder lenses wider than about 35mm were having problems with edge/corner colour shifts and/or smearing when used with the old Nex5/3 bodies. I'm pretty sure it was caused by the poor design of the sensor toppings in those bodies.
So any new small wide lens design would have that very problem. And that must be the real reason why we had no such lenses made for the original Nex bodies.

It's not only the NEX which have that problem: ALL digital cameras have it, even the Leica M8 and M9, which use software correction for vignetting and colour shift. What happens is that the light coming out of the short-focus lens arrives at an angle, hits the colour filter and ends at the wrong pixel (for example, it hits a red filter and a pixel which should read a green light).

As for the size of that Zeiss, imy guess it that it is a retrofocus design, made to avoid this problem which would affect a much smaller Biogon.

[agorabasta]

There are problems and problems

The first and most important for all the silicon sensors is that there are far too many reflective surfaces in the path. The silicon itself, the wiring atop of it are quite reflective; then all the colour filters sitting attached to the silicon surface also cannot filter by absorption, they may be made filtering only by reflection as otherwise they would easily overheat and burn out with, say, the sun in the frame. And then on the very top of the sandwich sits that ugly thing called the 'hot mirror'.

Now the specific problems may differ.
First of, the original M8 was a failed design with almost no IR hot mirror. The idea was to minimize the trapped reflections between the silicon and the hot mirror that are the main reason for the corner/edge purple veiling and smearing. (It's purple because the Bayer pattern is green in transmitted light and purple in the reflected, and the IR mirror is also purple for oblique reflections. The silicon surface reflections through the Bayer filter turn very green being filtered twice, so they are normally almost unnoticeable.) So they killed that hot mirror and got tons of parasite IR exposure all over the image surface, it produced purple-red tinted shadows; so that later Leica had to offer free bolt-on IR mirror lens filters to all their M8 customers.
The M9 seems to be OK in that regard, so a good enough hot mirror is definitely possible...

Now on to the Nex5/3 along with the excessively purple-fringing SLTs.
The original Nex suffered most from the trapped reflections under the hot mirror. Those reflections are strong enough to not only produce a purple ghost in the corners, but they are even strong enough to produce corner smearing from the multiple re-reflections there. And that's exactly what got corrected with the new C3 - purple ghosts stayed while the smearing is now gone. And I also heard some anecdotal reports that the colour shifts with adapted rangefinder lenses are gone as well!
The SLTs, on the other hand, naturally didn't exhibit corner smearing having their lenses generally more telecentric by retrofocus design. Instead, they exhibited some excessive purple fringing caused by the same purple ghost reflections all over the frame at wide aperture with some less telecentric lenses. The effect looked different, but was really caused by the same flawed design of the hot mirror. So now that the C3 clearly has got a better hot mirror, the new SLTs may stay free of that excessive fringing. Though it would be better yet to move the hot mirror onto the SLT mirror altogether.

[alphaomega]

The more rumours I read about the new NEX products the more I like the NEX-7 and if it all turns out to be true I shall probably invest in one and the new converter LA-EA2 with built-in Translucent mirror provided it wil AF with Alpha lenses without inbuilt motors. That will provide tremendous flexibility and enable use of legacy AF enabled A mount lenses. I will also likely purchase the E-mount 55-200mm for still use although I would first try my Sony 18-250 with LA-EA2 on NEX-7. It should also work on my NEX-5 so my first purchase might be LA-EA2.
The proliferation of NEX bodies and new users ought to push Tamron and Sigma into releasing E-mount lenses to provide a wider choice, but if Agorabasta is right that the vignetting problem on W/A lenses has been resolved the LA-EA2 might