The revolution is rolling. Sony just announced two new mirrorless cameras the A7 & A7R. Panasonic will officially announce their newest mirrorless camera, the GM1, tomarrow. Both announcements are literally revolutionary. Why? It’s all about size and weight with phenomenal image quality. Sony’s new cameras are extremely small yet both have a so called Full Frame 35mm sized sensors. Same size as as the Nikon D600 and D800 cameras, however, the body of both new Sony’s are much smaller and lighter.
[youtube]http://youtu.be/bnvgceTEV3c[/youtube]
The new Panasonic is equally unbelievable and maybe more. The new Lumix GM1 is a mirrorless Micro Four Thirds sensor camera with a new, smaller, compact zoom of 12-32mm. That’s the equivalent to a 24-64mm full frame lens. All of this and it fits in your shirt pocket. It has the same sensor as the GX1 which is superb. The one frustration I’ve had with the Lumix kit zoom (14-42Xlens) was its range of 28-84mm (35mm equivalent). I love wide angle and the new kit zoom of 24-64mm is exactly the range I dreamed of for a small take everywhere type camera. 24mm on the wide side is going to be nearly perfect. The new lens is supposed to be sharper and better quality overall though the old one was definitely very good to great.
This image from 4/3 Rumors shows the new GM1 size difference comaprted to the GX1. The GX1 is incredably small so the GM1 is hard to believe. I’m wondering if it may be too small. We shall see. You can click on the image to see ore about the GM1 on 4/3 Rumors.
Many of you know I’ve been talking about camera manufacturers heading in the smaller, lighter, higher quality direction for quite some time. Sony is now leading the charge with Panasonic and Olympus not far behind and maybe even neck and neck. What I just can’t understand is where the heck are Nikon and Canon? I can’t believe they aren’t frantically working on their own ideas but their competitors are really turning up the heat and moving FAST.
Nikon’s own Mirrorless V2 camera. It’s biggest drawback is the inch sized chip.
Nikon is ahead of Canon in the test phase it seems with Nikons J1/V2 mirrorless camera and I’m hopeful some of the Series One technology will be added to the next D5. Only time will tell. The Nikon One Series of cameras have some amazing technology. My biggest disappointment with the Series One cameras is the size of their small 1 inch sensor. But maybe this segment for Nikon is just a test bed and we’ll see some of J2 features in larger Nikon’s sensor cameras soon. Based on the review from the guys in The Camera Store TV video (these guys do a great job) there are some drawbacks to the the new Sony’s compared to Nikon and Canon DSLR’s. The biggest issue is speed of Auto Focus which is just not there yet for the Mirrorless cameras. That being the case, Nikon and Canon have nothing to worry about, for the time being, when you need a camera that can shoot high frame rates in Predictive AF. Check this blog post out for an idea of what superb Predictive AF is all about. But it won’t be long before the mirrorless segment gets this figured out. It’s all very exciting stuff. Take a look at the video above. These guys do a nice job.