2013 Mirrorless camera shares in Japan: Olympus rules, Sony is catching up, Panasonic is falling.

BCNranking (google translation here) posted the full 2013 market share analysis. In the mirrorless category Olympus is leading the group closely followed by Sony. The big change is the 9% share drop fro Panasonic. Quite a bad news!

It will be interesting to see if the Sony A7-A7r series will have a major impact on 2014 sales. My guess is that Sony could become number one in Japan!

On the state of mirrorless.

There is this ongoing discussion about the mirrorless and DSLR future, based on IDC, CIPA and other numbers, as well as some personal anecdotal evidence. A few posts on SAR featured some rather heated debates in the comments (which is good, I think). Hence, I decided to stir the pot even more and write my personal opinion in more detail, in the hope to have an even deeper discussion about this.

Read more

Panasonic will launch the first 4K GH mirrorless camera in February!

Well we have some good news! The Panasonic 4K Gh camera displayed at CES in Las Vegas is not a mockup, it’s a real camera that will be officially launched in February!!!

Engadget reports that the camera will cost less than $2,000 and…

UHD content can be recorded at 200 Mbps, and output in a full live feed via a mini-HDMI port (thanks to ALL-I Intra mode) to display on a computer or record to a hard drive. Of course, the Micro-Four Thirds shooter can save footage straight to an SDXC card — a UHS Class 3 prototype variant tuned for such a task was on display — though space will run out fairly quickly.

And I am pretty sure Sony will be the next company launching such a 4K mirrorless camera!

The new Fuji XF lens roadmap!

Preorder Note:

56mm f/1.2 lens  at Amazon US (Click here to grab it) and at BHphoto (Click here).

Black X100s (preorder here) and a lot of compact cameras (full list here at Amazon).

 

Unlike many other companies Fuji openly talks about their lens strategy and roadmap. And as you can see from the picture five new lenses will appear as next. Here is the full press text:

Fujifilm release 2014 and early 2015 roadmap for X mount lenses

Featuring five new lenses including four zooms that boast advanced optics and fast apertures

Fujifilm Corporation (President: Shigehiro Nakajima) has released its latest roadmap for X mount lenses, adding five new lenses including four zoom lenses to the lineup of X mount products.

Since they were introduced in January 2012, the X mount series of lenses have boasted advanced resolution to all corners of the image, and fast aperture across their focal lengths. They produce sharp images and beautiful bokeh which expands users’ expressive potential.

The latest roadmap shows that the lineup will be enhanced with the introduction of the following lenses: 

A bright XF16-55mmF2.8 R OIS standard zoom lens
A bright XF50-140mmF2.8 R OIS tele-photo zoom
A high magnification XF18-135mmF3.5-5.6 R OIS zoom lens
A super telephoto zoom lens (Focal length and Aperture TBC) 
A high speed wide angle prime lens (Focal length and Aperture TBC)
This will bring the total number of lenses in the X mount lineup to seventeen.

Fujifilm will continue to integrate the rich optical expressions made possible by the X mount lens series with the company’s color reproduction and other image processing technologies to further expand its photographic offering.