There was an official L-mount alliance press conference at the CP+ show (see video below). Two news are important:
L-Mount aims to expand its ecosystem by welcoming more participants, ensuring a diverse and innovative product lineup in the system camera market
Many companies have expressed interest in joining the alliance
For me, point one is crucial. We only have Panasonic making “mainstream” and also “affordable” cameras. Leica cameras are too expensive for most and Sigma is going niche with the BF. I would be happy if DJI and other cameras would also produce L-mount system cameras!
PetaPixel had a tour of Sigma’s headquarters in Aizu, Japan. And theyshared an interesting curiosity:
The Sigma BF is milled from a single block of aluminum on state-of-the-art five axis CNC machine, which is a process that takes seven hours to complete. It should be no surprise, then, that the production capacity is extremely low: just nine per day.
I wonder how many BF cameras Sigma will be able to sell…
DxO has made some very exciting changes to the best preprocessing and denoising software ion the market. With this version of DxO PureRAW 5 you will get:
DeepPRIME3 now incorporating three processes that improve image quality for discerning photographers. These are:
Demosaicing
Denoising and now
Chomatic Aberration, which fixes residual chromatic shifts at the pixel level, as part of the raw conversion process.
For the first time in PureRaw 5 you get Local Adjustments enabling photographer to target their sharpening and denoising processes this is particularly useful for working with the shadow areas of high ISO images.
Brand New Interface – with a new workflow including new presets to speed up your workflow. The intention with DxO PureRAW is that as it is at the first step of your image workflow it has been designed to be fast.
“PureRaw as it is at the very start of your workflow it should be as fast as possible to bring you immediately to the best starting point” Fabrizio Dei Tos – DxO
When asked by CineD about the possible S1H successor, Matt Frazer said that we will ‘eventually’ get a replacement. When asked why it took so long to get the S1rII, he said that they wanted the right sensor for their target. So there’s not much teasing from Matt, but as I’ve said many times before, there will be another Lumix camera announcement in April. And soon I might be able to tell you a bit more about this camera 😉
Last years roadmap did show a fast 28/30 to 70/80mm lens
ThePhoBlographer reports that Panasonic did show to the press an updated Lens Roadmap that has yet not been made official:
During our meeting with Panasonic about their new LUMIX S1r II, the company showed us a lens roadmap with two major curiosities. In two locations were generalized names. There was one from the 24-60mm range and another from the 100-500mm range.
Looking at the company’s current lenses, we can’t see them replacing the 24-70mm f2.8 so soon. Furthermore, in the roadmap, the lens that we saw wasn’t reaching into the 70mm range at all. We highly doubt that they’d make a 24-60mm f2.8 — that would be wildly unpopular and unreasonable.
So it looks like the large aperture zoom has shifted from the original 28-70mm -ish focal length to a more interesting 24-60mm lens. ThePhoBlographer is confident that it will have a constant f/2.0 aperture:
However, if there indeed is a 24-60mm f2 coming, then we’d be insanely excited about it.
Damn, I think this would be way more interesting than the Sony 28-70mm f/2.0 and Canon 28-70mm f/2.0 lens. Having 24 instead of 28mm at the wide end is way more useful than the missing 10mm at the tele end.
So let’s hope that Panasonic will release the new lens roadmap soon, because this is certainly big news!
