After Panasonic and Hasselblad also Leica “dreams” about making a Leica-phone

Leica CEO Andreas Kaufmann told at CNBC that he would like to make a Leica-phone:

“I am not sure whether the company can do (this) … (But) one dream would be my personal dream: a true Leica phone,”

Leica wouldn’t bet the first camera company to make a photography oriented phone. Panasonic miserably failed with the CM1 and CM10 (no success on market). And Hasselblad recently launched their True Zoom

My advice to Leica? Forget about this :)

Nikon patented a 35mm f/2.0 lens for a mirrorless sytem camera with curved Full Frame sensor!

We now might get a clue about the new Nikon Full Frame mirrorless system camera. And the big surprise could be that it has a curved sensor! We received those images from a new patent (published 2017.7.20) describing a 35mm f/2.0 lens designed for a Nikon mirrorless camera with curved sensor. A curved sensor would allow to design more compact lenses (or faster at same size) compared to classic lenses designed for flat sensors. At the same time the images are equally sharp from center to the edge with no vignetting.

We don’t know if this design is applied to a fixed lens or to a system camera or if it’s just something that will be never find its way on a real mass production camera. But this would indeed be a killer feature on a system camera. To compete with this…the competition would have to once again launch a new system from scratch!

Back in 2015 Sony registered patent for a Full Frame Sony curved sensor with 35mm f/1.8 lens. But they could not use any of their current E-mount lenses on a Sony camera with curved sensor. So this is more likely to be used on a fixed lens RX camera.

Here are some more sketches describing the Nikon 35mm f/2.0 lens:

List of upcoming announcements: E-M10III, EOS-M20, Fuji X-E3, Sony A7III and Panasonic ???


The A7II will be replaced by end 2017 or early 2018

Til late August we don’t expect any new camera announcement. But we have a realistic estimate of what we can expect during the second half of the year:

End August-Early September timeframe:
– Olympus E-M1oIII with 20MP and 4K
– Canon EOS-M20 with 24MP
– Panasonic entry level camera (no info about the camera model yet)

November at earliest:
– Sony A7III (24MP and 4K)

Unclear timeframe:
– Fuji X-E3 (end 2017?)
– Nikon FF (probably 2018 only)