Photokina Roundup 2014

FZ1000.  Building for the future.

 

Every year  I offer commentary on the state of the camera industry from a consumer's perspective. This year Photokina appears to be a suitable window on the products  and possible direction of the major players.

I have no affiliation with any maker or vendor of  photographic equipment. I have over the years bought and used equipment from almost every manufacturer.

So without further ado and in alphabetical order:

Canon  Canon had two really huge, innovative wonderful new product announcements this year.

*  In the DSLR category they revealed the amazing new EOS7D Mk2.  After 5 years of intensive research since the release of the Mark1 Canon revealed to an awed audience that they have Changed the location of the DOF Button !! (whatever that is).

* In the Powershot compact category Canon revealed with great pride that they have Stolen the RX100 from Sony!!  But someone forgot the EVF. Oops, sorry about that, maybe next time.

Seriously, well semi seriously anyway, Canon is showing a lack of initiative which I find puzzling. You see back in the late 1980's Canon was the innovator, turning out products with technical and product initiative which moved the whole industry forward.  I switched from Pentax to Canon and stayed with Canon until the arrival of  the mirrorless Micro Four Thirds system, the new innovator.

Whatever happened at Canon ?  Have they gone to sleep ?

Fuji    For some reason Fuji insists on calling itself Fujifilm. Maybe that sounds  better than Fuji Digicams. I read recently that their biggest selling product is the Fuji Instax instant film camera, so maybe the  ".....film" name is not so strange after all. 

Fuji released the X30  not-very-compact which is just like the X20  but with an EVF instead of an OVF.  Fair enough but most other players in the compact category have gone for bigger and better sensors leaving even Fuji fanatics wondering why they would buy the X30.

Then in the even-less-compact category the amazing new X100T was revealed to a packed audience of admirers.  This has the same sensor, same lens and same body as the previous model. Apparently the viewfinder is a bit different. And a few other inner tweaks.  Wow ??

But the really BIG  announcement and I do mean BIG was the 140-400mm XF lens for the X-T1, E2, Pro 1 line of APS-C cameras with 28mm diagonal X-Trans sensor.

This is Fuji's long zoom with a field of view and aperture range very similar to the Olympus 75-300mm or Panasonic 100-300mm lenses for the Micro Four thirds system.  But look at the size difference.  The Fuji lens has twice the box volume of the M43 lenses. 

It seems to me that Fuji has shackled itself to three design features which I think  

a)  Give Fuji some points of difference in the marketplace  but which I believe are

b)  Holding back present and future development at Fuji.

These are

* The X-Trans sensor. I see little evidence this is any better than a modern sensor with standard Bayer layout. But many RAW converters can't or won't  handle the X-Trans files, or don't manage them very well,  which limits their more mainstream acceptance.

* APS-C sensor size (28mm diagonal). In my view this sensor size is obsolete.  It works well for normal lenses but long lenses become very big like the Fuji 140-400mm just pre-announced. You can have almost the same or in some cases better  image quality (it depends on exactly which products are being compared)  with the Micro Four thirds system which allows for much smaller lenses.

* The "Retro" control system with old style aperture ring on the lens and shutter speed dial on top of the camera body.  I have conducted  ergonomic comparisons between "new style", Mode Dial + Control Dial systems -vs- "old style" Aperture ring + Shutter Speed ring and found the new style is more efficient in operation.

Leica  The venerable Leica announced a bunch of new products this week.  But wait,  several of them look suspiciously like recently released Panasonic models  with the handle  removed, so Leica can charge its gullible customers extra for the body and double extra for an add on handle. Is that marketing genius or what ?

Leica also came up with the T also known as Typ 701 for some mysterious reason. Apart from the absurd marketing which went on and on about some poor employee, or maybe it was a desperate stock holder, sanding the surface of the thing milled from a solid block of unobtanium mined in the outer reaches of Alpha Centauri, the T actually looks to be interesting.

I have not had the ecstatic pleasure of actually laying trembling hands on one as yet, so I can't comment on handling and ergonomics  but somewhere behind  all the silly hype, someone at Leica seems to be trying to design a camera which is pared down to the essentials of picture taking. And that could be worth doing.  Potentially, anyway.

Nikon  "Our product development people want you to buy a NIKON brand full frame DSLR.   And if you can't afford one we suggest you eat very little food for a few months so you can save up for one. We now have lots of nice full frame DSLR's.  Each is slightly different from the other and if you buy one of each you will eventually come to understand the subtle differences between them.

We also make other cameras but there is not much profit on them, in fact recently no profit at all,  so we really want you to buy a full frame DSLR.  And lots of big expensive zoom lenses.

Please support our brand. We face difficult trading conditions and we need you to buy a full frame DSLR and some really big expensive lenses quite soon. Today if possible."

Olympus  has been a bit quiet this Photokina but they did announce the  Big Bazooka 40-150mm f2.8 mid range pro level zoom for the M43 system. This thing is big. It is 160mm long, has a mass of 880 grams and uses a 72mm filter. In fact it is in the same size/mass range as one of the 70-200mm f4 lenses for full frame.  Olympus did  the same sort of thing with it's ill fated venture into the 4/3 DSLR system. They produced big fast lenses of excellent quality which very few photographers bought. I wonder if they are going to have the same problem in the Micro Four Thirds arena. Panasonic's offering in the same general range is the 35-100mm f2.8 which is less than half the size and mass of the Olympus lens. It has a less ambitious focal length range of course but it's compact dimensions are much more in keeping with the ethos of the M43 concept.

The promotional material with the big bazooka  indicates  that it has only 2 aspheric elements and I wonder if a lack of access to affordable aspherics is part of the problem.   By way of contrast the lenses in the Panasonic FZ1000 and LX100 each have 8 aspheric surfaces according to the promotional material. Both these lenses are remarkably compact for their specification, due presumably to the extensive use of aspherics made by Panasonic in house.

Panasonic  The Panasonic parent company has been in deep financial trouble in recent years with top execs reportedly telling divisions to make a 5% return on capital invested or close up shop.

Maybe this is the fire which is driving product development in the camera division right now. Whatever the reason Panasonic has emerged as the year's strongest performer, with a range of innovative, desirable products indicating vigorous evolution in the technology and product development realms.

I have the FZ1000 which performs well above expectations in a wide range of photographic environments. The GM5 is interesting and will appeal to users who lust for smallness. The LX100 is, in my view, the star product of the show, setting a new standard for the advanced compact camera genre.  The GH4 is deservedly winning awards all over for outstanding performance in both still and motion picture operation.

Bravo Panasonic.

Ricoh/Pentax  Last year Pentax stunned the world, or possibly put people to sleep,  by offering a camera, I forget which one, in "a hundred different color combinations". This year they have threatened to make a full frame ILC next year.  In a hundred color combinations ?

Samsung  I bought and used the NX10, 11 and 20 along with if memory serves correctly about 16 lenses over a three year period. I became completely disillusioned with Samsung's inability to keep up with their competitors in any field  of technology or product development. In addition I found a high proportion of the lenses had serious defects mainly decentering.

Now Samsung presents to, I suspect, a mostly indifferent world the big and bold NX1 with a set of very big and bold high specification lenses. Samsung wants to be taken seriously as a maker of professional cameras, having presumably failed to make much headway with  cheaper consumer models.

Good luck Samsung. The question is why would anybody jump ship to join the Samsung team ?  I can't think of a reason.

It seems to me Samsung's NX1 venture is too big, too late. Some of the lenses are very big indeed.  If I were in the market for something big and brash, which I am not, I would probably stay with the proven performers,  CanoNikon DSLRs.

Sigma   As they used to say in Monty Python skits "And now for something completely different"  Sigma offers the dp2 Quattro and a stranger camera-like device I never did see. Apparently it takes quite good pictures in the right conditions. But so do several million ordinary cameras which are not afflicted by idiosyncratic behaviour, ergonomics and image processing. OOPS.

Sony  Last but by no means least we come to the industry's most innovative player. But  innovation needs to proceed hand in hand with coherent product development and there Sony and it's customers have a disconnect.

Sony, with no outside assistance, has created a huge mess with it's proliferation of lens mounts, back focus distances and  product line names. How they will extricate themselves and their customers from this remains to be seen. But not this year.

In fact Sony had very little to show at Photokina this year.

If Sony hired me to advise on their product development strategy I would suggest they do a Canon 1987. In that year Canon dropped the old FD breech mount and adopted the completely new and  incompatible all electronic EF mount. The FD faithful screamed  but the customers bought EOS cameras in their millions and sent Canon to the top of the sales charts.

I think Sony needs to clear the product decks in similar fashion. They need to dump the old Minolta SLR mount altogether and concentrate their ILC energies on a single lens mount, possibly but not necessarily the existing E mount.

But I would take this one step further and suggest that in addition they dump the APS-C (28mm diagonal) sensor size and replace it with something very close to the 4/3 (21.5mm diagonal) sensor, which will work just fine in the E mount.

They could of course simply join the M43 consortium and go all the way with the M43 system but that of course uses the M43 mount which is not the same thing as the E mount at all.

But if they did that, which would be a very sensible move by the way, it would make a standalone  E mount problematic because the inside of this mount is actually smaller than the full 24x36mm frame size which makes designing lenses for the FE mount challenging ........................................as I said, it's a mess.

The problem with the APS-C (28mm) sensor

The problem with APS-C (28mm diagonal) is that it requires telephoto zooms and superzoom/travel zooms which are much larger than those for the M43 system with very little if any gain in picture quality. In fact in my recent testing M43 travel zooms tend to deliver better picture quality than those of comparable focal length range from 28mm sensor systems.

This problems afflicts Canon, Fuji, Leica, Samsung and Sony.  In my view they jumped on the wrong bandwaggon with their mirrorless ILCs.  Micro Four thirds was and is the ILC system most likely to succeed.  It strikes a nice balance between size/mass and quality/performance.

Summary  The most recently arrived major player in the field of mainstream camera manufacture is Panasonic. Perhaps because of this or  perhaps consequent on the threat of annihilation in the event of ongoing losses, Panasonic has this year presented the most coherent and thoughtful set of  photo products, which I believe people will want to buy and use.

Well, I buy them. And use them.