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Bob Atkins previews Sony's newest NEX body the F3
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I’m not a trade show guy. I just don’t really relish doing anything with 100,000 other people. Then add in rushing around across the show for meetings, getting lost, getting trampled by crowds trying to catch a glimpse of a celebrity, waiting forever for a bus or taxi, and overpriced overbooked airplanes/hotels and you’ve got what I consider a long week. But to be fair, it is always good to get some face to face time with the people and companies that I interact with via phone and email. At CES 2012 I saw a lot of neat things that I expected to see, saw a few things that I hadn’t heard of before, and saw a handful of hush-hush upcoming projects that we’ll all be talking about in the not too distant future. While I can’t share any of the secrets, here is a quick wrap up of what I considered to be the most interesting of the CES 2012 photographic announcements.
This was the big-boy of CES announcements for most photographers. A brand new high-end full frame SLR from Nikon that matches up quite nicely with the previously announced Canon 1DX (and looks to be on the shelves faster and at a price point $800 lower, $5999 vs Canon’s $6800). 16.2 megapixels, 36×23.9 mm CMOS sensor, 11 fps (10 fps with AF), 3.2-inch, 920,000-dot LCD, 51 AF points, ISO 100-12,800 (50-204,800 expanded), two memory card slots using CF and the new XQD cards, AF at f/8 allowing use of AF with additional teleconverter/lens combinations, and 1920×1080 (30/24 fps)/1280×720 (60/30 fps) movie modes. If you are looking to compare feature to feature, the Canon 1DX does beat the Nikon on a few fronts. But it would be hard to consider the D4 as anything but “up to date”. And despite the fact that these are top end cameras, that $800 price difference may be a big deal for some people. Particularly when you consider that some of the feature comparisons between the Nikon and Canon have little relevance to many people. For example, while sports and journalist photographers will always tell you that higher frame rate is better, for the rest of us it’s hard to come up with a reason why 14fps would be any more useful than 11fps. Both are incredibly fast.
I got to meet with Toshiaki Akagi, General Manager, 1st Designing Department at Nikon in Japan and a key figure in the D4’s development. He talked about the increased AF fps, lower color noise at high ISO, improved tonal curve, and the addition of the QCD card slot (with its faster throughput) as some of the improvements over the D3S that Nikon was most proud of. He (along with Nikon USA’s Kenji Suzuki and Yasuhiro Nozaki, where were doing the interpreting) had brought along some 13×19 prints to compare the same scene captured with the D4 and D3S. It was hard to argue that there wasn’t a very real improvement in the D4 shots. We’re not talking seismic changes here, but the digital camera industry is largely beyond that sort of thing. This was simply the kind of steady improvement that you want to see in a new version of a high end camera.
How long have some of us been begging for the digital era’s “Leica rangefinder” kind of camera? I’d say for about as long as digital cameras have been mainstream. Yes, there are the compact system cameras. Sure, you could buy a Leica M9. It’s an amazing camera that has silenced virtually all of the digital rangefinder critics. But it’s also $7000-8000 for the body alone. What’s a guy who isn’t made of money to do? Enter Fuji’s X-Pro-1. Building on their successful single focal length X100 and fixed zoom X10, Fujifilm has taken the next step and created an interchangeable lens camera with the X-Pro-1. With a basic set of three lenses to start, XF 18mm F/2 R (27mm equivalent), XF 35mm F/1.4 R (53mm equivalent), and the XF 60mm F/2.4 R Macro (90mm equivalent), the X-Pro-1 won’t win any system size awards. But the three lenses cover a lot of ground for most photographers. The X-Pro-1 has the X100’s excellent hybrid viewfinder but ads the ability for the optical aspect of the VF to zoom automatically when changing lenses. Perhaps most interesting is the new sensor. They ditched the typical Bayer pattern that most sensors used and replaced it with 6Ã6 arrays of RGB filters that are laid out in a somewhat random manner. The idea being that the new arrays would more accurately imitate the randomness of film grain. In additional advantages, this new sensor is said to eliminate moire patterns and it does not require a low-pass filter. Both of which should lead to some impressive image quality improvements over the X100.
In the hand, it feels like you are holding something from the golden age of rangefinders. The controls are designed in a way to allow the photographer to rely as little as possible on the awkward button-press-scroll-through-menus contortions that we all must do with many cameras. The Pro-X-1 instantly makes you say “This camera was designed by people who love making images”. More than anything, I wanted to break the security cable and run out in to the wild world of Las Vegas to start my own documentary project on gamblers or neon lights or all night wedding chapels or something ANYTHING that would let me take advantage of this camera that so obviously wanted me to make images with it. Yes yes, I’m exaggerating a bit and of course the proof will be in the pudding of how the production models perform. But it’s hard not to be a bit excited.
Sigma was showing some new lenses at CES. Without taking anything away from the beautiful new 180/2.8 macro, the really interesting lenses were the 30/2.8 and the 19/2.8. And in all honesty, it wasn’t the lenses themselves so much as the mounts that they were made for. Both of them will be available for Sony NEX and micro four-thirds camera bodies. On the Sony NEX cameras the 19mm and 30mm equal 28.5mm and 45mm field of view respectively (in 35mm equivalents) and the micro four-thirds lenses equal 38 and 60mm respectively. These lenses are exciting for mirrorless system users because it lends even more legitimacy to a class of cameras that are already starting to take the photography world by storm. When a third party lens manufacturer starts making products for a new mount or system, that can only mean good things for the overall strength of that system. Now, of course, this may mean more for Sony NEX users than micro four thirds because micro four-thirds has been around for a while now and has multiple manufacturers producing lenses. But at the end of the day, I think it still say something very positive about the future of the compact systems when a company like Sigma sees them as being viable enough to tool up for a whole new mount. The Mirrorless train is coming, I think a lot of us are going to be getting on board in 2012.
With everyone and their brother coming out with their own take on a mirrorless system camera, Canon has decided to go their own way and address another hole in the “advanced” photographer non-DSLR market. The G1X is a large sensor fixed lens compact. The best way to think of it would be that it is a Canon g12 “all grown up”. With a 24-112mm (in 35mm equiv) f/2.8-5.8 lens, a 1.5-inch High Sensitivity CMOS sensor, a DIGIC 5 processor and ISO up to 12800, the G1X packs a heck of a lot into a small package. Yes, the sensor is a little smaller than APS-C. But it still compares favorably with other compact system cameras out there. So I would be surprised to see anyone get too hung up on the sensor size as a negative for the G1X. A optical VF still remains, though it’s nothing special it may still hold value for some users. As is typical these days, the G1X has 1080p video and a dedicated movie record button. There are no dedicated accessories for the G1X (though an UW case is said to be coming), but it will accept Canon Speedlights and other hotshoe accessories.
In the hand, the G1X feels solid. I wouldn’t call Canon’s G series of cameras “toys” by any means, but holding them side by side, the G1X just feels like a more substantial well-built camera. And that is saying something as the G12 is a nice camera in its own right. The control layout is slightly different from the G12. But the focus on external controls rather than button presses is still just as clear. I’m not going to tell you that the G1X is perfect in this regard, but it is miles ahead of many other cameras in it’s class. Another area where the camera offers an advantage over most of it’s compact system competition is in the G1X’s articulating LCD. This is one of those features that you don’t miss until it’s gone and after using a pile of compact cameras recently that do not have an articulated LCD, I found myself happy to see that the G1X had gone in a different direction. Will people jump on a large sensor camera that has a fixed zoom lens? I think they will. There is a market out there for this sort of design. Particularly so when it comes from a company like canon and as an extension of a line (the G series) that is well proven.
Like many of you I suspect, I have a tendency to overlook the advances in memory card technology. I think more of us notice price drops than we do technology hurdles cleared. Given how crucial of a link memory cards are to the photographic process these days, that is probably something we should all work on lest we end up using bargain basement knockoff cards and losing our precious images to failures. But even without a laser focus on card improvement, it’s hard to ignore a number like “1000x”. 1000x means 1000 times faster than the old old-school 1X speed of 150KB/s, which equals 150mb/s. Now, most cameras can’t match this speed, but it can still help a lot with video or bursts of images. And it absolutely helps with transfer to a computer (assuming that you are using a USB 3.0 card reader). Speed is wonderful, but expect to pay for the pleasure. Lexar’s new cards are far from the cheapest cards out there, ranging from $170 for 16GB up to $900 for 128GB.
As mentioned above in the D4 section, XQD cards are the new hot memory storage device. And as of right now, Sony is the only manufacturer who has started producing them. Sony announced two models of XQD at CES, the 16GB QD-H16 card for $129.99 and the 32GB QD-H32 for $229.99. Both should be on the shelves in February. Smaller than a CF card but bigger than a SD card, the main advantages of the XQD cards are throughput speed and capacity. While at 125 mb/s the current cards are slower than the Lexar 1000X cards above, the 2nd and 3rd generations of XQD cards should have speeds of 250 mb/s and 500 mb/s. In addition, the XQD cards should be able to exceed 2 terabytes of capacity in the future, according to the the CompactFlash Association. Does photography need another card format? I do not know. However, it’s hard to argue with something that claims we will be able to see speeds like 500 mb/s and capacities that are listed in TB rather than GB. So I’d say we all should be pretty interested.
Synology makes NAS (Network Attached Storage) enclosures everything from single drives all the way up to 12 bay rackmount models. While their higher end stuff is designed for medium to large scale business use, many of their products are aimed at the home or small business user. For example, one of the cooler products they have is the DS411slim. It’s a 4 bay RAID enclosure that uses 2.5in drives. The thing is tiny, it takes up as much desk space as your average computer speaker. Plus, if you load it up with solid state drives, the thing is practically silent.
Synology was showing off version 4.0 of their Disk Station Manager firmware that includes, among other things, a feature called “Cloud Station”. Cloud Station allows users to instantly sync files from any device, either over a local network or remotely via the internet. Sort of like a personal (and free) version of Dropbox, along with syncing between devices it also keeps a copy on the NAS as a backup. A quite nifty feature of Cloud Station is that it does not require any complicated port forwarding or other confusing nerdism to connect via the internet. You just connect and go. Very clever.
We’ve all heard about the Lytro camera. You know, the one that allows you to focus AFTER you have made the image. I was able to spend some time using a pre-production model and talking with the Lytro team. Okay, so it wasn’t at CES proper, but it still happened during my time in Vegas. Using the Lytro is an interesting experience even if just for the fact that is isn’t shaped anything like what we have come to expect a camera to be shaped like. It’s more like a square tube than a flat rectangle. Operation is simple, with just a power button, a shutter button and a touch slider for the zoom. There are a few on screen choices that you make via the touch LCD (along with tapping to set the focus point and/or exposure). But everything is designed to be pretty simple.
How did I like the results? Well sadly I haven’t seen them yet. The Lytro people took the cameras back (they were pre-production models like I said) and were going to get images to all of us later. I expect that will happen shortly. Once it does, I will write up a longer report. Overall though, it’s a fascinating new technology that I’m not 100% sure what to do with yet. Still, more than just about anything at CES, I was glad to have been able to play with the Lytro.
There were a lot products at CES aside from these eight, but these were eight of my favorites.So there you have it. A small report from CES 2012. No, I didn’t see the keynote speeches. No, I didn’t meet anyone famous. Heck, I didn’t even get time to track down the weirdest tradeshow booth attention grabbing antics. But I did get to see and play with some cool photography stuff.
