Carl Zeiss' camera lens division renewed a partnership with Sony for another five years, the companies announced Wednesday.
The partnership began in 1996 with a Sony camcorder using a Zeiss lens, then extended to compact cameras. More recently, with Sony's entry into the SLR market, Zeiss-branded lenses are available on those high-end cameras, too.
Another electronics giant making its way into the camera market, Panasonic, has adopted a similar strategy with another German camera company renowned for its engineering, Leica.
The 0.42x wide-angle adapter decreases the focal length of Lensbaby's selective-focus lenses.
(Credit: Lensbaby)Lensbaby is bringing a wider look to its line of selective-focus lenses, announcing the 0.42x Super Wide lens that expands its products' 50mm field of view to 21mm.
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Sony showed concept models of six new SLR lenses at the PMA show.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)LAS VEGAS--Sony showed off models of a forthcoming supertelephoto and five other lenses Monday at the Photo Marketing Association trade show, a new sign the electronics giant is holding tight to its ambition to be a major player in the digital SLR market
"Sony is passionate in proving better lens development," said Shigeki Ishizuka, president of Sony's digital imaging business group, at a news conference held here in conjunction with PMA. He said Sony now ranks third in the SLR market.
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The Sigma 10-20mm F3.5 EX DC HSM
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)LAS VEGAS--Offering some higher-end alternatives and expanding image stabilization more broadly, Sigma announced a trio of lenses for digital SLRs Monday at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) trade show.
The three new models, which will work on Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Sony, and Sigma cameras, are a higher-end 10-20mm ultrawide-angle zoom, and 18-50mm and 50-200mm zooms that unlike earlier models come with optical stabilization. The lenses are due to ship this spring, but pricing isn't yet announced, said Christine Moossmann of the company's marketing department.
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Phase One's upcoming 60-megapixel professional camera.
(Credit: Phase One)Phase One is fleshing out its transformation from a maker of high-end image sensors for others' cameras into a maker of full-on cameras.
At the Photokina camera show in Germany, the company announced "successful alliances" with Leica Camera, Mamiya, and Hartblei to bring third-party lenses to its Phase One 645 camera system, and it said it will begin selling several lenses of its own by the end of the year. Those lens models are a 28mm f4.5, a 45mm f2.8, an 80mm f2.8, a 120mm f4.0, a 150mm f2.8, and a 75-150mm f4.5 zoom.
The professional camera, with a 60-megapixel sensor and a starting price of $41,990, is also due to ship by the end of the year. Coming in the first quarter of 2009 will be an 80mm leafshutter lens and a vertical grip.
The company also announced at the camera show an upgrade to the professional version of its its raw-image editing software.
Also new from the company is a 15-megapixel sensor mode for the 60-megapixel sensor. This mode combines four pixels into one that measures 12 microns square, extending the sensitivity range to ISO 1600.
The Lensbaby Composer has a traditional focusing ring.
(Credit: Lensbaby)Lensbaby's selective-focus lenses thus far have brought a seat-of-the-pants, analog feel to the electronic and digital world that photography has become. But a new model announced Tuesday has a more traditional interface for those who weren't happy with the company's earlier approach of squeezing and flexing the lens until the image looks about right.
For the uninitiated, the company's approach deserves a little explanation here. Lensbaby lenses let people focus tightly on a selected spot; the rest of the view quickly recedes into blurriness. It's a bit gimmicky, but it gives a different look than most lenses, it can be fun to play with, and if done well it can really focus attention well on the subject. The product works because its outer lens element can be bent so it's not parallel to the image sensor--in effect, it's a cheap tilt-shift lens.
The new model, the $270 Composer, forsakes the earlier flexible plastic bellows system for something resembling a ball-and-socket joint. Instead of squeezing to focus, the photographer twists a traditional focusing ring. The mechanism looks much cleaner and easier to use than the complicated struts-and-knobs approach of the earlier Lensbaby 3G, though I fear grit could work its way into the mechanism.
The 3G got a redesign, too. It's morphed into the $270 Control Freak. And the first-generation Lensbaby is similarly reworked into the Muse, which costs $100 to $150 depending on whether it uses plastic or glass lenses.
The major new feature of the updated models is what the company calls the Optic Swap System, which lets users change the lenses. The four options are a double glass element, a single glass element, a single plastic element, and a pinhole/zone plate.
The announcement came during the Photokina photography show in Germany.
Nikon's new f/1.4 lens should cost about $440 when it goes on sale in December.
(Credit: Nikon)Nikon announced an update to its 50mm f/1.4 lens on Monday, a relatively high-speed mainstay set to go on sale for $440 in December.
The new lens, called the AF-S Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G, has less chromatic aberration and internal flare than its predecessor, Nikon said. It's also got a silent wave motor for quiet, speedy autofocus, a close-focus distance of about 18 inches, and nine rounded aperture blades for a smoother look, called bokeh, in out-of-focus regions.
Lenses with a fixed 50mm focal length are very common, though not as much as during the era before zoom lenses became standard for entry-level SLR cameras. Nikon's current AF-S Nikkor 50mm f/1.4D costs about $300.
"Experienced photographers have always appreciated the incredible image fidelity and low-light ability that a precisely engineered 50mm lens can deliver," Edward Fasano, general manager for marketing for Nikon's SLR systems products, said in a statement. "In addition, seasoned shooters often prefer the photographic discipline imposed by the use of prime lenses."
The company, which has been gaining market share on market leader Canon, announced the new lens in conjunction with the Photokina show in Germany. Nikon also said it's produced 45 million SLR lenses over its history--notably, 5 million of them in the last year.
Most folks think of a photo as a two-dimensional representation of a scene. Stanford University researchers, however, have created an image sensor that also can judge the distance of subjects within a snapshot.
To accomplish the feat, Keith Fife and his colleagues have developed technology called a multi-aperture image sensor that sees things differently than the light detectors used in ordinary digital cameras.
Each subarray on the multi-aperture sensor captures a small portion of the overall image, a portion that overlaps slightly with that of the neighboring subarrays. By comparing the differences, a camera can judge the distance of elements in the subject. (Note that this mock-up differs from reality, in which each subimage would be rotated 180 degrees, but this makes the idea easier to grasp.)
(Credit: Keith Fife/Stanford University)Instead of devoting the entire sensor for one big representation of the image, Fife's 3-megapixel sensor prototype breaks the scene up into many small, slightly overlapping 16x16-pixel patches called subarrays. Each subarray has its own lens to view the world--thus the term multi-aperture.
After a photo is taken, image-processing software then analyzes the slight location differences for the same element appearing in different patches--for example, where a spot on a subject's shirt is relative to the wallpaper behind it. These differences from one subarray to the next can be used to deduce the distance of the shirt and the wall.
"In addition to the two-dimensional image, we can simultaneously capture depth info from the scene," Fife said when describing the technology in a talk at the International Solid State Circuits Conference earlier this month in San Francisco.
The result is a photo accompanied by a "depth map" that not only describes each pixel's red, blue, and green light components but also how far away the pixel is. Right now, the Stanford researchers have no specific file format for the data, but the depth information can be attached to a JPEG as accompanying metadata, Fife said.
Recording photos in three dimensions is a pretty radical overhaul of the concept. Depending on your preferences, it could be anything from an exciting new frontier to the latest annoying digital gimmick.
Either way, you'd best start thinking about the implications because Fife isn't the only one working on the challenge. Image-editing powerhouse Adobe Systems has shown off some 3D camera technology too. It should be noted, of course, that stereoscopy itself is an old and respected photographic subject.
Even if you don't want to print holographic pictures of your new kitten, I suspect that 3D technology could help with some traditional photography challenges. Just as face detection can make a camera decide better where to focus and how to expose a shot, having a depth map could make this sort of calculation that much more sophisticated.
This diagram shows the multi-aperture sensor, which puts a small lens over a group of image sensor pixels. Each subarray gets its own microlens.
(Credit: Keith Fife/Stanford University)
Other advantages
Depth isn't the only potential advantage of the multi-aperture approach, Fife said. It could also help reduce noise, which in digital photography takes the form of colored speckles that are a particular plague when shooting at higher ISO sensitivity settings.
The noise is reduced because multiple subarrays capture the same views. It's therefore easier to distinguish true color of the subject from off-color noise. In addition, each subarray can be set to record a specific color, which could reduce the "color crosstalk" of current image sensors, he said. Today's "Bayer" pattern sensors employ a checkerboard of red, green, and blue pixel sensors, but bright red light captured by a red pixel can, for example, leak out a bit and affect the neighboring blue and green pixels.
Each subarray gets its own microlens. Although that complicates the manufacturing of the sensor, it could simplify the lenses used in existing cameras, Fife said. And lens manufacturing today certainly has no shortage of difficulties with a variety of exotic glass and even fluorite crystal elements, aspherical elements, and other avant-garde optics.
"There is opportunity for most of the complexity of the lens design to sit at the semiconductor rather than at the objective lens," Fife said. "Although the local optics (on the sensor) may be challenging, it is possible that the optics can be better controlled with lithography and semiconductor processes than with the injection molding and grinding that is used in the conventional camera lenses."
The microlenses might even be all that's needed for some applications, such as taking super-closeup "in vivo" photos inside plant and animal subjects where there's no room for a camera, Fife said. "The multiaperture sensor can form images at close proximity...because no objective lens is needed," Fife said.
This photo shows the prototype chip with 12,616 subarrays. Each pixel on the chip is 0.7 microns on edge, and the chip consumes 10.45 milliwatts of power.
(Credit: Keith Fife/Stanford University)
No free lunch
Lest you get carried away by the technology, you should be aware of a number of caveats:
• Because the same subject matter is captured redundantly by multiple pixels, the ultimate sensor resolution is lower than the raw number on the overall sensor.
• Processing the image, both to figure out how to merge the subimages into one overall image and to create the depth map, takes about 10 times as much processing horsepower as conventional on-chip image processing. Cameras already are battery hogs, and nobody wants to draw any more power or slow down camera performance.
• 3D images are possible only with subjects that have texture and other detail. "If a picture is captured of a perfectly smooth white wall, it is impossible to estimate the distance to that wall," Fife said.
So those are the downsides, but that's par for the course with new technology. And even if the technology never materializes, it's a strong indicator of the radical transformations that are in store for digital photography.
Nikon's PC-E Micro-Nikkor 45mm f/2.8D ED
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)LAS VEGAS--Nikon just introduced a 24mm "perspective correction" lens, but the camera maker also showed off two new prototypes of the same ilk.
As promised last week, Nikon showed off a new PC-E Nikkor 45mm f/2.8D ED at the Photo Marketing Association trade show here. Also under a glass booth was the PC-E Micro-Nikkor 85mm f/2.8D.
Note that the latter model lacks the "ED" suffix that indicates extra-low dispersion glass used to maximize sharpness and minimize chromatic aberration. Nikon last week employed the ED suffix in describing the lens, but there was a conspicuous rectangle carved out of the name badge right where those two letters would have appeared.
Regardless of what the 85mm lens composition and name, it definitely looks different from Nikon's existing PC Micro-Nikkor 85mm f/2.8D.
Nikon's PC-E Micro-Nikkor 85mm f/2.8D lens
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)The perspective-correction lenses, also called tilt-shift models by rival Canon and others, let a photographer optically alter the perspective of a view, for example changing the vertical lines of a building so they are parallel rather than convergent.
Architects are a particular market for the specialty lenses, which aren't cheap: Nikon's PC-E Nikkor 24mm f/3.5D ED will cost $1,930 when it goes on sale this fall.
The two new perspective-correction lenses "are scheduled to become available through Nikon authorized dealers during the summer of 2008," Nikon said last week.
Speaking of coveted lenses, Nikon also showed a D3 SLR with the newer 14-24mm zoom lens mounted--both sawn in half down the middle. All I can say is I hope it was a factory reject.
Nikon's newer D3 SLR and 14-24mm zoom lens, shown here sawn in half.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)
The 18-125mm F3.8-5.6 DC OS HSM has Sigma's optical stabilization technology built in to counteract camera shake. It's for Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Sony, and Sigma SLRs. The stabilization feature doesn't work on Pentax and Sony cameras, which have that built in.
(Credit: Sigma)LAS VEGAS--Sigma, a third-party maker of lenses for SLR (single-lens reflex) cameras, has expanded the range of Optical Stabilization (OS) lenses, those with a moving lens element that can compensate for camera shake.
Of eight mainstream lenses the Japanese company announced at the Photo Marketing Association trade show here, three new telephoto lenses include OS. (I'm not counting Sigma's 200-500mm f/2.8 super-telephoto behemoth as mainsream.)
The three stabilized lenses are the 18-125mm F3.8-5.6 DC OS HSM, the APO 120-400mm F4.5-5.6 DG OS HSM, and the APO 150-500mm F5-6.3 DG OS HSM.
However, several new 70-200mm telephoto zooms, each with a wide f/2.8 aperture, lack the stabilization feature.
Sigma also announced two lenses for Four Thirds System SLRs, which are sold by Olympus, Panasonic, and Leica. Those are a wide-angle zoom, the 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC HSM, and the telephoto zoom, the APO 70-200mm F2.8 II EX DG MACRO HSM.
Update 1:20 p.m. PST: There's no price or availability information yet on the stabilized lenses, said Sigma spokeswoman Desiree Gaige, but they'll likely arrive sometime this summer. The 50-150mm will cost about $1,350, the 70-200mm models $1,420, and the 10-20mm $730, and those probably will be available in the next couple months, she said.
Here are some photos and details on the other lenses:
The APO 70-200mm F2.8 II EX DG MACRO HSM is for Pentax and Sony SLRs.
(Credit: Sigma)
The APO 70-200mm F2.8 II EX DG MACRO HSM is designed for Four-Thirds system cameras.
(Credit: Sigma)
The APO 120-400mm F4.5-5.6 DG OS HSM is an optically stabilized model for Nikon, Canon, Sony, Pentax, and Sigma SLRs. Its close-focus distance is 59 inches.
(Credit: Sigma)
The APO 150-500mm F5-6.3 DG OS HSM is for Nikon, Canon, Sony, Pentax, and Sigma SLRs. It's got optical stabilization built in.
(Credit: Sigma)
The APO 50-150mm F2.8 II EX DC HSM is for Pentax and Sony SLRs.
(Credit: Sigma)
The 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC HSM is for Four-Thirds cameras from Olympus, Panasonic, or Leica.
(Credit: Sigma)
