Camera & Video Gear

7artisan’s $90 18mm F5.6 Full-frame Lens

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Small wide-angle lenses used to be a very desirable thing.  Back in the film days there were many esteemed photographers who loved the manual focus 20mm F4 lens.  And F4 is a lot more versatile than F5.6, but for many landscape photographers they could probably get buy with this aperture.  It might also be useful as a gimbal lens.  The lens is basically a cheap, wide-angle pancake lens that weighs only 146grams.  It’s available for the Nikon Z, Sony E, and L mount systems.  Close focus is 0.3 meters / 0.98 feet.

The real question is how does it perform optically.  Early reports indicate a sharp center, weaker edges, reasonable distortion, and significant vignetting.  This is kind of what you would expect from a small wide-angle lens.  The vignetting may or may not work for your use case.

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Rokinon Remaster Slim Wide-Angle 3-Lens Kit

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Rokinon, aka Samyang, has released an interesting lens kit.  There is a base module and then 3 different sets of optics you can swap out inside of it:

  • 21mm f/3.5
  • 28mm f/3.5
  • 32mm f/2.8

These lenses are tiny and full-frame.  Check on the weight on the optical blocks:

The set is available for the Sony FE mount and comes at a price of $399 USD.

To make lenses this small there has to be sacrifices in the optical formula.  Sometimes these sacrifices can create an interesting look, and at other times they add offensive elements.  So how did Rokinon do? It looks like they came up short, unfortunately.

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New Camera Coming from DJI

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DJI Support has stated:

Hi there, thank you so much for your attention. Please stay tuned with us as our mysterious new product will be launched soon. For more details, you will find out on the launch date.

It’s funny to see a company refer to their own product as mysterious.  We truly hope this a full-frame camera as DJI likely has the freedom to be a bit more disruptive and innovative in what they release.  They’ve certainly made things interesting in regards to lower-end cine cameras.

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A Fixed Lens Medium Format Camera from Fujifilm (GFX100RF)

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The Fujifilm GFX100RF is reported to come with a 35mm F4 pancake lens and a 100 megapixel sensor.  It will be interesting to see just how small they can get this camera.  Multiplying 35mm by 0.79 gets us the full frame equivalent of 27.65 or, rounded up, 28mm.  This is a popular focal length for single lens cameras as we see in the Ricoh GR series which offer 28mm and 40mm options.

This camera won’t be cheap but it may just be the ultimate medium format travel camera.  If it has competent video features that would be quite interesting also but we’re not holding our breathe for that.

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Fujifilm GFX Eterna

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We’re very happy to see Fujifilm create a medium format cine camera.  What we know so far is that it features the same sensor as their medium format GFX 100 Mark II camera.

We were a bit surprised that there wasn’t better dynamic range on the GXF 100 Mark II compared to its full-frame counterparts (although you of course still benefit from the field of view that the sensor provides).  Also, the rolling shutter is not great on this camera.  Hopefully both of these factors can be corrected in the Eterna.

We look forward to the first footage which we will post here.  We have no further details at this time.

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New Camera and Lens Coming from OM Digital

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The CEO of OM Digital has stated:

We plan to add a new camera to our lineup and bright, compact single-focal-length lenses with splash & dust-proof performance. Additionally, we are continuing to work hard to bring to market the long-awaited mid-range telephoto zoom lens on our lens roadmap by the end of this year

OM Digital is the rebranding of Olympus Cameras that were bought up by another company.  Olympus did innovate with some of their micro-four-thirds cameras so we hoped OM Digital would carry on the flame.

This new camera hopefully has a 1-inch sensor and some set of features to set itself apart from other 1-inch sensor cameras.  Otherwise it won’t be exciting.

The mid-range telephoto sounds like a 50-200mm.  Maybe a pro 50-200mm F4? 50-250mm?

Discuss the New Lens on the Gear Rumors Forums

Discuss the New Camera on the Gear Rumors Forums

New Yashica Fixed-Lens Compact Cameras

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It’s nice to see compact cameras being made again.  Smart phones obliterated this market, but there’s still some things that smart phones cannot do as well as a dedicated camera.  This market will never recover to its previous glory but hopefully a nice niche will develop here.

Here’s what we know about these cameras:

  • Called the Yashica City line
  • Yashica City 100 has a fixed-lens with 3X zoom
  • Yashica City 200 has a fixed-lens with 10X zoom
  • Both have the same 1/3.06-inch 13-megapixel Sony sensor
  • 4:3 photo aspect ratio
  • Offers 4K video
  • Autofocusing
  • Price starting at around $249 USD (not confirmed)

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New Panasonic L-Mount Camera Coming Soon

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Unfortunately we do not know which model.  Some early murmurings seem to point to a high megapixel model being released next but this has not been confirmed.  Stay tuned as we will post any information we can confirm about this camera as soon as we get it.  What a lot of people are hoping for is a Panasonic S1H II but this upcoming camera does not appear to be that.

Leica SL3-S Digital Camera

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leica sl3 s digital camera

The Leica SL3-S Digital Camera is going to be announced on January 16, 2025.

The current Leica SL3 sells for $7000 (USD) and features a 60 megapixel sensor.

What has been rumored is:

  • Contains the 24.6MP sensor of the current Leica SL2-S
  • Tweaked/slightly improved ISO performance
  • C2PA support (a technical standard for certifying the source and history of media content)

The Leica SL2-S currently sells for $3000 which is a price reduction from its launch.  We’re guessing that the SL3-S will be around $5000 but we’ll be happy if it’s lower in price.

This camera will really only be of interest to those already in the Leica ecosystem.  Sadly, it’s not that exciting of an addition and we really wish companies would innovate more.

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