[finaldesignrb]

Klaus perhaps a market will develop with professional photographers for used Nex bodies as 300-gram, and 300 dollar, accessories to large lenses. If this happened, you may end up wanting to test the Nex with large lenses.



I am NOT trying to get you to start testing the Nex with large lenses this year. Rather am trying to imagine and predict a trend and pleasant discussion topic, and new way to think of using increasingly light weight camera bodies.



The theoretical idea is that as camera bodies decrease in weight and size towards zero, instead of you thinking that it is increasingly absurd to imagine wanting to use such bodies on large lenses, perhaps you and everyone else will start thinking of tiny bodies as increasingly pleasant accessories for big glass. As in conveniently customized electronic accessory gadgets for each piece of unavoidably big glass. Is it silly to use a 300 gram camera with a 1-kilogram lenses? Maybe not, if it is barely more trouble to attach the little body to (each?) lens you own than it is to carry around the bare lens anyway.



Am starting to think of a pleasant kit containing the 550g Tokina 11-16 or the Sigma 8-16 lens with one Nex body, and a 200gram-ish 85mm f2.8 on another Nex. What is so weird about it? The kit would only weigh 300g more than a bag with just one body and the two lenses. And no need to switch lenses in the field, just pick up whichever lens/body combo you need at any given moment.



Maybe quality and ease of use will end up better with no more weight than some kind of compromised ultra mega-zoom on a big heavy body. And don't we usually end up using different default settings for radically different lenses anyway? Been thinking lately that we tend to use wide angles at wide open much more often, because we can. Tend to use the panorama feature and high dynamic range feature more on wide lenses too. And I never use my close portrait lenses at less than f8 if I can help it, for all-of-face focus clarity, and I want higher shutter speeds and maybe ISO on the longer lenses too. So it would be nice if I could leave each body in my kit set up closer to correct for the lens it is forever attached to. Not to mention the pleasant fault tolerance/redundancy in the field of having multiple bodies/batteries in case one fails.



Of course at this moment the 110g e-mount to a-mount adapter would be needed for almost all lenses, somewhat spoiling the concept (but I want a tripod socket on all my lenses anyway, so the adapter with socket will often not be such a waste). And used Nex bodies don't exist yet, and will probably cost more than 300 U.S. dollars when they do. For a while. Hmm, don't need panoramas on my long lenses, and simple optical viewfinders might work OK on fixed focal length wide ones. Maybe there will be plastic "Nex 1's" some day that will weigh and cost even less, with the fancy features stripped out, ready for tripod-adapted big lenses, and we'll buy a bunch of them, one for each optic we own.

[Klaus]

Actually your vision is somewhat heading towards the Ricoh concept. The camera is merely a sensor-less box that hold the lens unit with the sensor and suppies the "infrastructure". The sexappeal of this concept is to use a comparatively small sensor for tele task - thus keeping the size/weight at a minimum - and larger sensors wide-to-medium-tele lenses where the lens size isn't an issue yet.



However, yes, keeping multiple NEXes would make sense as well. The NEX-3 is already very cheap.





[quote name='RussellB' timestamp='1285656575' post='3307']

Klaus perhaps a market will develop with professional photographers for used Nex bodies as 300-gram, and 300 dollar, accessories to large lenses. If this happened, you may end up wanting to test the Nex with large lenses.



I am NOT trying to get you to start testing the Nex with large lenses this year. Rather am trying to imagine and predict a trend and pleasant discussion topic, and new way to think of using increasingly light weight camera bodies.



The theoretical idea is that as camera bodies decrease in weight and size towards zero, instead of you thinking that it is increasingly absurd to imagine wanting to use such bodies on large lenses, perhaps you and everyone else will start thinking of tiny bodies as increasingly pleasant accessories for big glass. As in conveniently customized electronic accessory gadgets for each piece of unavoidably big glass. Is it silly to use a 300 gram camera with a 1-kilogram lenses? Maybe not, if it is barely more trouble to attach the little body to (each?) lens you own than it is to carry around the bare lens anyway.



Am starting to think of a pleasant kit containing the 550g Tokina 11-16 or the Sigma 8-16 lens with one Nex body, and a 200gram-ish 85mm f2.8 on another Nex. What is so weird about it? The kit would only weigh 300g more than a bag with just one body and the two lenses. And no need to switch lenses in the field, just pick up whichever lens/body combo you need at any given moment.



Maybe quality and ease of use will end up better with no more weight than some kind of compromised ultra mega-zoom on a big heavy body. And don't we usually end up using different default settings for radically different lenses anyway? Been thinking lately that we tend to use wide angles at wide open much more often, because we can. Tend to use the panorama feature and high dynamic range feature more on wide lenses too. And I never use my close portrait lenses at less than f8 if I can help it, for all-of-face focus clarity, and I want higher shutter speeds and maybe ISO on the longer lenses too. So it would be nice if I could leave each body in my kit set up closer to correct for the lens it is forever attached to. Not to mention the pleasant fault tolerance/redundancy in the field of having multiple bodies/batteries in case one fails.



Of course at this moment the 110g e-mount to a-mount adapter would be needed for almost all lenses, somewhat spoiling the concept (but I want a tripod socket on all my lenses anyway, so the adapter with socket will often not be such a waste). And used Nex bodies don't exist yet, and will probably cost more than 300 U.S. dollars when they do. For a while. Hmm, don't need panoramas on my long lenses, and simple optical viewfinders might work OK on fixed focal length wide ones. Maybe there will be plastic "Nex 1's" some day that will weigh and cost even less, with the fancy features stripped out, ready for tripod-adapted big lenses, and we'll buy a bunch of them, one for each optic we own.

[/quote]

[blende8]

There are quite good Novoflex adapters for almost all kinds of lenses:

Canon FD, Contax/Yashica, Leica M, Leica R, M42, Minolta AF / Sony Alpha, Minolta MD, Nikon, Olympus OM, Pentax K, T2, Hasselblad, Mamiya 645, Pentax 67



At the Photokina they introduced a new tripod mount for these adapters:





Here is the Sony with the Pentax M135/3.5:

[finaldesignrb]

[quote name='Klaus' timestamp='1285659879' post='3308']

Actually your vision is somewhat heading towards the Ricoh concept. The camera is merely a sensor-less box that hold the lens unit with the sensor and suppies the "infrastructure". The sexappeal of this concept is to use a comparatively small sensor for tele task - thus keeping the size/weight at a minimum - and larger sensors wide-to-medium-tele lenses where the lens size isn't an issue yet...

[/quote]



Thinking about your Ricoh analogy, Sony has purposely designed the (Nex) e-mount large enough to work well with "full frame" (24x36mm) sensors. So as you imply, some day we might click an APS-C (16x24mm) sensor body onto a portrait 50-150mm tele-zoom, making it a compact longer tele-zoom, or click on a full frame (Sony Nex or whatever) body to use that same zoom for max quality, close-in portrait work. Hey, wonder if the e-mount will be large enough to work on a body with some kind of larger-than-24-by-36 sensor...maybe I won't throw away my old Mamiya 645 lenses.



Hmm, the trouble with that tangential thought is that as sensors get better and better, who will want the bigger sensors...I am already losing interest in anything bigger than APS now that my wedding clients are very pleased with the Nex's ISO 800 quality.



Of course there are lots of camera systems that do this already, let you use lenses on APS or full-frame bodies. The special thing about having a collection of e-mount bodies in our future is that the concept will be most practical. A body can apparently be only 300 grams, and small.



And the mirrorless design means that it can end up adapting to just about every lens ever made from any manufacturer. As you are doing a good job of showing us.

[popo]

[quote name='RussellB' timestamp='1285688644' post='3324']

Hmm, the trouble with that tangential thought is that as sensors get better and better, who will want the bigger sensors...I am already losing interest in anything bigger than APS now that my wedding clients are very pleased with the Nex's ISO 800 quality.[/quote]



Varying focal length for an equivalent field of view and keeping the same aperture, a bigger sensor gives you shallower DoF. So while you can compensate to a degree by using faster glass on smaller sensors, there comes a point where it becomes impractical.



Now, the weakness to the above is that many cameras (particularly compacts) offer fake shallow DoF processing. If this is "good enough" then the shallow DoF potential argument could diminish.

[genotypewriter]

[quote name='popo' timestamp='1285694234' post='3327']

Now, the weakness to the above is that many cameras (particularly compacts) offer fake shallow DoF processing. If this is "good enough" then the shallow DoF potential argument could diminish.

[/quote]



Wonder which will happen first... optical zoom being replaced with digital zoom or what you said above ;P



GTW