Photoclub Alpha

Sony, which has a UK event taking place on Thursday July 15th showcasing new products for the Christmas market, has surprised us by launching its NEX mount HD camcorder with 14.2 megapixel CMOS sensor and 18-200mm OSS interchangeable lens much sooner than anyone expected.

I was going to post this on our Forum for NEX originally. It’s not good form to launch into what may be seen as ‘rival’ publications or journalists, so it’s the kind of thing which is often kept to blog pages or forum discussion. But Practical Photography is one the best-selling, and most powerful, photo magazines in the world.

So, I copied my ramblings and moved them here, instead of putting them in a forum post where just a few hundred people would see them. Tens of thousands of visitors see Photoclubalpha’s main site articles, and I want this to be seen, because it matters.

Sony has announced two new cameras this morning – but it’s not an announcement which will have Alpha system users rushing to the cashpoint and queuing at Sony Style. The Alpha 290 and 390 are dumbed-down versions of the 230/380 with user interfaces partly borrowed from the NEX including the built-in Help Guide. The rear 2.7 inch Clear Photo LCD screeen does most of the work of communicating with the user.

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The European press launch

David Kilpatrick recorded the proceedings at Le Meridien Lav Hotel, Split, Croatia on March 11th 2010 using a Zoom H2 portable digital recorder. Shirley Kilpatrick transcribed the audio, with subsequent editing to translate verbal output to read well as text. This is a multi-page document please use the PAGE navigation at the foot of each page to continue reading. It is a very long document.

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The Sony NEX-3 and NEX-5 cameras are ultra-slim interchangeable lens models, referred to as ‘ultracompact’ or ‘compact system camera’ models by Sony. The lens flange to film distance is only 18mm, compared to 44.5mm for the Alpha system and very similar figures for all popular SLR brands.

The Leica M and screw mounts, with under 1mm difference between them, are 10mm greater than this at around 28mm. Screw mount Leica lenses can be adapted to M even though there is only 1mm difference. With 10mm difference, almost any lens ever made for any camera – even the Robot system, original Contax, maybe even the Pentax 110 SLR – can probably be adapted to fit the E-mount. In fact it will accept 16mm and 35mm (half-frame) ciné, C-mount CCTV lenses, and subminiature camera lenses.

You name it, the NEX will be able to do it. Telescopes, microscopes, endoscopes, whatever. And Alpha lenses, and MD lenses. There is even enough ROOM with over 25mm the spare to fit a true retrofocus format reduction converter – that is, a 0.66X optical unit which condenses the image from a full frame lens to fit the APS-C sensor. It is already done in the video and ciné world, and these converters have a wonderful bonus. Your 24-70mm f/2.8 SSM lens becomes, with a 0.66X reducing converter behind it, a 16-46mm f/2. That’s right – the same way a teleconverter loses you a stop or two, a format reduction converter gains you a stop.

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SPLIT, Croatia, breakfast over - Sony Europe presents the new NEX-3 and NEX-5 mirrorless, HD video capable slim interchangeable lens APS-C digital cameras. This has been a launch anticipated by almost complete and accurate leaking of the specifications of the two cameras. Sony UK also provided advance information to all dealers, including pricing, before the press launch – allowing retail websites to have full data up and running as from May 11th.

Toru Katsumoto presents his team’s latest offering (he holds a silver NEX-3)

The entire system with accessories is to be available in June at once, no waiting for anything except the 18-200mm lens which will arrive a month later. Edit: the brochure says ‘October’ for the 18-200mm, at the presentation it was said that it would follow in a month or so. October is four months or so.

SONY has shown itself to be lagging behind the competition as we reach the third bend on the second lap of the development of HD-video capable DSLRs. At PMA 2010, nothing ‘real’ was shown and the closest they came to further launches in the Alpha range was an advanced pre-production prototype of a 24mm f/2 Carl Zeiss T* ZA SSM.

But Sony may prove yet to be the tortoise – or perhaps to be Brer Rabbit. They could make the finishing line, the goal of a truly useful video DSLR, before Nikon/Canon/Pentax/OlySamPanny get there.

The Alpha System celebrates its Silver Jubilee or 25th Anniversary this month – though left uncelebrated by the inheritors of the Minolta AF legacy, Sony. They have no reason to draw fresh attention to the age of the system, as in four years they have taken it the same sort of distance that Minolta took the world’s first AF system in the late 1980s.

It’s not only Alpha’s 25th birthday. This is also the 25th birthday of modern AF SLR systems – all of them!

This is a multi-page article. See the links at the bottom of the page to Continue Reading after each page.

For Photoclubalpha and the historic Minolta Club of Great Britain, the anniversary does matter. A good many of you out there have been members since the launch of the system, often using the earlier SR and X manual focus systems before that. We still have a 1985 Minolta 7000AF and it’s still working just as it did when new.

25 years before the first Minolta SLRs appeared – a folding Minolta Six of 1935

I don’t mind showing my age to make a comparison. I was 11 in 1963 when I took my first pictures with an SLR camera. My father had bought himself a Pentax S3 – and the camera it replaced was 25 years old, a pre-war Zeiss Ikon Kolibri collapsible 16-on-127 model.

When the Kolibri was made, 127 was the ‘vest pocket’ format of choice. 35mm was on the rise, but 35mm SLRs had not yet arrived. They were as much a thing of the future as digital SLRs were when the Minolta 7000AF was launched.

But within that 25 years, there was hardly a single camera system made with interchangeable lenses that did not become obsolete. Only the ‘frozen assets’ of the cold war kept some systems, like the Exakta bayonet and the Praktina, alive. New brands were launched, from the British Wrayflex and Periflex to the Italian Rectaflex and many German oddities. It was not unusual for an entire system to be come and gone within a few years.

Even in the following quarter-century, the high years of the Japanese 35mm SLR, the succession of lens mount changes was bewildering. Independent lens makers like Tamron and Sigma were forced to make systems using interchangeable mounts not just because the public wanted it. A dozen or more mounts were made for every lens and in the 42mm screw thread fit alone there were endless variants – Praktica LLC (Pentacon Electric), Olympus FTL, Pentax ES and more.

It was more or less a 25-year cycle – the SR system was announced in 1958, and really got underway by 1960. It was to be another quarter century before the AF system arrived. We are now a further 25 years on – can we expect a totally new camera system, once again, in 2010?

Minolta’s SR bayonet mount, introduced in 1958/9, actually remained basically unchanged all the way through to 2005 when the last manual focus model, the X-370S, was available. It survives even now as a mount popular in China where the Seagull range from Shanghai Optical includes Minolta fit models. That mount only ever had one major revision, to add a linkage for open aperture TTL metering. The introduction of programmed exposure and shutter priority was cleverly enabled by using the existing design of lens mechanism and improving its accuracy, while adding a simple reference lug to the ƒ-stop setting ring.

Nikon’s 1959 F-mount proved similarly easy to improve without any basic modification. Both these bayonet mounts celebrated half a century of production in 2008/9 – another landmark, which Nikon was able to celebrate but Minolta of course could not.

My review of the Sony Alpha 550 was supposed to appear at the end of November, allowing one week abroad in good weather with plenty of subject-matter, in Tenerife. Sadly that trip had to be cancelled, and the Nikon D3S arrived for review on the day we were meant to have travelled. So, with far too much work to do on the D3S, I’m “going to press” here with my initial thoughts based on a fairly short time using the Alpha 550.

There are 11 pages in this review, please use the Next Page navigation at the end of each page to continue reading. A sponsor link appears before the end of each page – “Get camera lenses at Shopping.com’s affordable deals.” Our thanks to Shopping.com for spotting and sponsoring this review!

Sony Corporation today announced the development of a single lens 3D camera technology capable of recording natural and smooth 3D images of even fast-moving subject matter such as sports, at 240fps (frames per second).  This technology combines a newly developed optical system for single lens 3D camera which captures the left and right images simultaneously, together with existing high frame rate (HFR) recording technology to realize 240fps 3D filming.  Sony will demonstrate a prototype model incorporating this technology at “CEATEC JAPAN 2009”, to be held at Makuhari Messe convention center in Chiba city, Japan, from October 6th.