If you look at the stats posted by Cipa you will see that compared to February 2013 this year Japanese companies shipped 33,7% more mirrorless cameras and 12,3% less DSLR cameras! After many months of negative trend the mirrorless shares are increasing again.

The data include DSLR and mirrorless camera shipped by Japanese companies. So these do not include Leica and Samsung for example. Doesn’t make a lot of difference as the big producers are all Japanese anyway.

Personal View analyzed the data in detail and you see how mirrorless sales are incredibly problematic on US market. Americans still love DSLR many times more than Mirrorless cameras :(

Imagine a sensor that has no light loss on corners, no aberrations. A sensor designed to allow faster apertures without to sacrifice image quality. Such a sensor would have to be curved to allow all this. Well, this is no more science fiction. Sony officially unveiled their curved sensor tech! And suddenly the hopes are high Sony uses this kind of tech on future RX or Full Frame E-mount cameras. This is the Sony presentation published right before the start of the Technology Symposium (pdf file here):

We realized an ultimately advanced imaging system that comprises a curved, back-illuminated CMOS image sensor (BIS) and integrated lens which doubles the sensitivity at the edge of the image circle and increases the sensitivity at the center of the image circle by a factor of 1.4 with one-fifth lower dark current than that of a planar BIS. Because the lens field curvature aberration was overcome in principle by the curved sensor itself, the curved BIS enables higher system sensitivity through design of a brighter lens with a smaller F number than is possible with a planar BIS. At the same time, we controlled the tensile stress of the BIS chip to produce a curved shape that widens the energy band-gap to obtain a lower dark current. The curved CIS can be applied to an ultimately advanced imaging system that is validated by the evolution of the animal eye in Nature.

If Sony is going to put this into a mass production camera…it will really put under pressure Canon and Nikon ;)

Well, there are plenty of amazing (and fake) news today! So here is a roundup of some April Fool’s day articles:

1) The video on top shows you how to make a pancake lens for MFT (Source: mirrorlessphototips)

2) Facebook just bought Leica (LesNumeriques).

3) Panasonic goes Full Frame (43rumors)

4) First Foveon Sony A9 camera (SAR).

5) Ricoh buys Nikon (Lepidi).

Let me know if you find some more! :)

E-M1 owner will be happy to see that Olympus just released a new firmware (version 1.3) for their camera (http://www.olympus.co.jp/en/support/imsg/digicamera/download/software/firm/e1/).

This is the full improvement list:

• Dynamic range has been expanded when using the external mic. The sound level adjustment has been changed to adjust to 21 levels in accordance with this. A function to turn the Volume Limiter on and off was added.
  • * When it is on, it automatically limits the mic input volume if sound input volume exceeds the designated level.
• A 0 second setting has been added to Anti-Shock mode.
• The camera operation when the Frame Rate of live view is [High] have been improved.