09-28-2010, 06:49 AM
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.
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.