Canon Announces G1X, aka G13 (UPDATE)

GAH! No more X's! For Christ's sake! When there is already a GX1 on the market, do not released a G1X! Are you freaking insane!?

There. Got that out of my system.

Well, it appears that rumors were, this time at least, correct. Canon is launching a large-sensored G-Series camera with a honkin'-big 1.5" sensor. Well, at least I think that is the case. That is a huge sensor, smaller than APS-C, but much larger than 4/3 and Nikon's 1-Series. I wonder if it is actually 1/1.5", which would make it the same size as Fuji's X10.

Then we have the problem of price, though. At $800, a camera with only a 1/1.5" camera would be ridiculous. And I mean that in the literal sense, in that it should be ridiculed. Fuji's X10 camera, at $600, is already overpriced, and $800 puts the camera so close to the X100 as to make them competitors. Canon would have to be out of their mind to release a camera for that price with that sensor. So either the sensor is correct, and it's enormous, or the price is wrong.

If the camera has a 1.5" sensor, then it's incredibly exciting. If it has 1/1.5", then it's incredibly boring. For Canon's sake, let us hope that it is the former.

UPDATE: Well, the information was literally correct. It is, indeed, a 1.5" sensor and is quite a bit larger than Micro 4/3. The camera is officially INTERESTING! If the lens on front is good, and it had better be considering that price, we may have one hell of a camera.

It's not sexy, like Fuji's cameras, but who cares? If Canon has fixed the dynamic range issue with its sensors and brought them up to the level of Sony's current crop, the image quality will be stellar. The maximum aperture is disappointing, though: only f/2.8. Again, even though the sensor will outperform Micro 4/3, I can get a Panasonic G3 and f/1.7 20mm for a similar price and the faster lens will balance the scale.

Canon is a company that gets things like autofocus and professional workflow better than almost any other company on Earth. This camera will have all of that. It is utilitarian. It is meant to get shit done. You may not feel very self-important while using the G1X, but unlike the guy futzing around with a Leica, you will get the shot.

The Fuji X10 was too expensive, and now it has been completely eliminated from an enthusiast's option list. When this camera only costs $200 more, and here's hoping Canon drops the price soon after launch, the X10 is a non-option.

Comparing this up-market to the Fuji X100, the sensors are of similar sizes, meaning that upping your budget to the X100 will probably not net you any significant increase in quality, although there certainly will be some. Thus, by plopping this very cool camera right in the middle of Fuji's price structure, Canon has done significant damage to both camera's prospects. By dropping the price by another $50, the damage could be even worse, so, Canon, I would wholly recommend doing that.

I think that the price is too high to be of great danger to Micro 4/3 as a system. Olympus' overpriced cameras are as good as dead, but Panasonic has the GF3 and G3, both of which cost less than this camera including a lens. That said, the GHx, E-Px, and now the GXx line of Micro 4/3 cameras are in serious danger. They have all been focusing on trying to be the up-market point-&-shoot camera, when they should have been focusing on the specific strengths of the 2x-crop sensor. Now they have been completely leap-frogged by a real point-&-shoot.

Micro 4/3 still has distinct advantages. The GH2 is a world class video camera. Olympus has with its Zuiko line, in my opinion, the best lenses in the world. And the f/1.7 20mm pancake remains such an excellent lens that it goes a long way to eliminating many advantages that other cameras have over the 4/3 alliance. Truly, 4/3 has a lot going for it. Here's hoping that Panasonic and Olympus can leverage those positives into success before other companies put them both out of their misery.

Details Of The Fuji X-Pro 1 Finally Leak

Extensive details of Fuji's upcoming interchangeable lens system have finally released and it is looking good. Remember when I posted that the only thing stopping me from jumping head-long into Sony's system from Canon and 4/3 was that I wanted to wait and see what Fuji produced? No? Read my blog more

While I think that the "Pro" moniker is a little bit presumptuous, the enthusiast market with a little money to burn will eat this up. It has the same retro styling that has made the X100 and X10 such darlings, and is launching with, assuming based on the price, three high-quality lenses. It is a small system, but one that appears well-chosen. Compare this to the large 4/3 and Micro 4/3 market, where they are selling five near-identical 14-42mm lenses with distinctly kit-lens quality.

Details about the sensor will not be solidified until its actual launch. As you would expect, Fuji is touting the sensor as the greatest thing in the history of everything ever, but that is just marketing speak. They claim that their APS-C sensor will outperform full-frame sensors, which I doubt. An engineer can only do so much with a set amount of light.

That said, the sensor is the most interesting sensor on the market, even compared to Foveon. There will be SIX different colored pixels scattered in a random array on the sensor surface. I have no idea how that is going to work, since the non-random nature of the pixels is kinda' important. Still, this has allowed them to use NO anti-aliasing filter, which means that the detail produced by the camera should be very impressive.

Again, I doubt that actual pros will be much interested in this tiny system and its quirky styling, but if Fuji gets the price of a body/lens combo under $1500, Sony will have some serious competition, and Micro 4/3 may be good as dead.

Sony Brings The Hurt

Sony's non-stop steamroller of innovation goes unabated. They have approved, apparently internally, production of a hybrid mount that will accept both E and A mount lenses. This unifies both the NEX and the Alpha systems in a way that neither Canon nor Nikon has done, even though it was an obvious advancement. Sony is playing for keeps.

This revelation has all but guaranteed that I will jump from Canon to Sony. While Canon's super telephoto lenses are amazing, their wide-angles are sub-par, and the 1DX has become, the more I think about it, a purely whelming camera. It is evolutionary in the blandest sense of the term. Sony is dancing around with revolutionary, and that's a lot more exciting.

Granted, I have a great deal of flexibility. I am not a working photographer. I earn very little money with my work. I think that if any of that were true, I would stick with Canon, but it is not. I am an enthusiast. My most expensive lens cost less than $2,000, and ergonomics and go-anywhere mobility is of great concern to me. Also of great concern is how flexible and dynamic my system going to be going into the future. In this regard, both Canon and Nikon have worked very hard to make sure that their systems are not flexible and dynamic.

That is why I jumped onto Micro 4/3 so early on. With two major companies behind it, I was expecting rapid and exciting development. Obviously, that has not happened, but it at least appeared that way in the beginning.

Even more exciting is what this development portends: a dual system of mirrorless and translucent mirror technology. This is fantastic. As I mentioned, I'm a bit underwhelmed by the sharpness and noise characteristics of their SLT cameras and would rather not have the mirror there. Ideally, they would give me the ability to simply move the mirror out of the way, but this is cool, too.

Thus, we have an incoming A-mount, Full Frame camera that will also accept E-lenses in a cropped mode. It's unknown if this will be a mirrorless camera. The optical characteristics of A-mount lenses seems to indicate that it must be, or it must have some internal corrective optics. What is known is that the design will skew toward the NEX style, which implies mirrorless.

Regardless, this is incredibly exciting news. It shows that, finally, a camera company has the balls to really shake up the market.

Thoughts On The Olympus E-7

Olympus has spoken rather candidly in a recent interview, indicating that all-new PEN cameras will be launched in 2012: not news. What was news, though, is that they indicated a successor to the E-5.

This is big news for anyone involved in the Olympus 4/3 system. Used Olympus lenses dropped in value after it became painfully apparent that the E-5 was a swansong of sorts, and the future for the company was Micro 4/3.

Many people thought that 4/3 was fundamentally flawed from the beginning. I am not one of them. There are significant disadvantages to a smaller sensor, certainly, but for many applications, the advantages balance the equation quite nicely.

Wildlife photography, for example. The 4/3 sensor doubles both the focal length and the depth of field for any given lens size/aperture setting of a full-frame camera. That is a HUGE benefit. I do not own any FF camera, but lenses I do possess quite a few. The few times that I have tried to shoot birds... photograph... photograph birds, I am always dismayed by the ISO and aperture that I must use to achieve similar shots on the larger sensor.

Combined with the fact that I consider Olympus' top-pro lenses to be the best lenses at their respective focal lengths, 4/3 always had an appeal.

As is seemingly always the case with Olympus, the problem was the sensor. The E-1, E-3, E-5, and the multitude of inbetween cameras were all pathetic in comparison to APS-C sensors. You might not always notice this in JPEG, but the differences are loud and clear when working with RAW.

Likewise, Olympus always seemed to position their E-x series in multiple worlds, as though they didn't know whether the cameras were for pros, enthusiasts, or consumers. Their top cameras are weather-sealed and are the only avenues into lenses that cost, in some cases, four times the camera, but are slow shooting, have control setups more in-line with consumer cameras, and have ridiculous "art" filters that are squarely aimed at casual shooters.

The successor to the E-5, the E-7 if their naming scheme holds, must reject everything Olympus has done and start over. Every element of the camera must be pro-level; size must be reduced in every area that doesn't affect controls and usability; camera processing must receive a massive upgrade; the sensor must be all-new and all-different (perhaps a 1:1 image ratio); everything that everyone else isn't doing, Olympus must do. If Olympus doesn't differentiate this camera, it will fail.

Olympus is already on the verge. If they release yet another limp-dicked product, they are doomed in the camera world. The level of corruption discovered by the recent accounting scandal only reveals that executives were, them all, brainless and incompetent fools, which is exactly the group that one would expect to have released Olympus' recent series of products.

NEX-7 Gets REAL Review

DPReview, along with DxOMark, represents the best review site on the interpipes. They have finally produced a review of the system-making camera, the Sony NEX-7. Noise levels are about a half-stop higher than the Nikon D7000 or Pentax K5, but considering the amount of detail, I think that it is a worthy trade-off.

The most interesting factoid to come out of it is a small but noticeable difference in overall image sharpness compared to the A77 and A65. The lenses used are the same, which means that the slight sharpness drop is attributable to the translucent mirror. It's not a lot, but the noise difference was already enough to make me hesitate buying an Alpha. Adding a sharpness issue almost seals the deal completely.

That said, the A77 is still very good, but the NEX-7 is amazing. It is sharp as all get-out, has amazing color, and the noise floor is low. Moreover, the excitement being generated by this, and Sony's immediate release of a world-class prime lens in the form of the 24mm Zeiss F/1.8, indicates strongly that this is destined to be a large, vibrant system. It is the only system into which I feel even remotely safe investing. I think that there is enormous potential signaled by this camera.

Nikon D4 Vs. Canon EOS 1DX

Canon has officially announced its new C-Series cameras, along with a video-oriented SLR-style camera, and the EOS 1DX. Nikon's upcoming D4 has had some of its specs leaked, likely by Nikon itself. I'm not interested in determining which camera is better, since that's a pointless conversation, but instead what these cameras say about the underlying philosophies at their respective companies.

It's obvious that both companies understand the importance of video. Canon, probably because they have greater resources, have split off their video focus to an entirely new line. While Canon has touted the video performance of the 1DX, Nikon appears ready to completely leap-frog it. The D4 allows for a HDMI connection to external storage and a stream of uncompressed video. This seems like a minor decision, but I don't think that it is.

Canon has made the decision to leave out certain features from the 1DX. These features will likely be in the upcoming C-Series SLR, which is stupid. There is no reason why these features couldn't be put into any camera. The hardware is cheap. It's the desire to keep their cameras artificially delineated that motivated the decision. And it's that decision that gives me a window into the workings of Canon.

I have been a Canon fan for quite awhile. Their D-SLR cameras were easily the best for many years. That has changed in the last couple of years. Nikon matched and then surpassed them. Pentax and Sony were next. And now Fuji is surging. This should be the time that Canon throws everything it has into every camera that it makes.

Instead, we get artificial restrictions. Instead, we get Canon trying to push yet another system on people. These are not the behaviors of a company that is ready to deal with an increasingly dynamic, innovative market. It is the behavior of a company that is soon to be reduced to a bit-player by other companies who are willing to push boundaries.

I don't think that Nikon is much more willing to innovate, but this shows that they are at least somewhat. Mind you, I won't be caught dead buying into either Canon or Nikon, right now. The market is shaping up to be entering a stage of extreme upheaval, the likes of which we haven't seen since the shift from European companies to Japanese companies with the rise of autofocus. Yet Canon, more so than Nikon but not by much, is behaving as though things are staying more-or-less the same. When I see arrogance and laziness like that, I can't help but hope to see them fall flat on their face.

First Review Of The Panasonic X 45-175mm Lens

ePhotozine has posted a review of the new Panasonic 45-175mm X-series lens. It is not terribly worth mentioning --EPZ has terrible lens reviews; I don't know why they bother--- but a major review of this lens has been long awaited.

While the resolution charts are useless, the chromatic aberation charts are not, and the lens performs acceptably well on Panasonic bodies. Remember, these lenses all have automatic correct for this on Panasonic's bodies, so the real numbers are much higher. If the amount is near zero, that's fine, but at many lengths and apertures, the numbers are nowhere near it, meaning that the lens' actual, optical quality is very disappointing.

Unless another review produces some seriously good data, I'm not going anywhere near either X-series lens.