More patents disclosing a Sony medium format camera with curved sensor
sonyalpharumors.com
sonyalpharumors.com
Also: MEMS: make it active, fix shake in the focal plane, not in the lens. Simpler lens, cheaper to make
I also doubt it will prevent the use of 'legacy glass'. If there's one thing my experience with Sony mounts has taught me, -somebody- will make an adapter. Yes, it may involve another element or two in the path to rectify. But I would be -shocked- if Sony didn't have a path here; a decent amount of e-mount adoption has been thanks to the adaptability of the system, and my guess is they can easily price this in a product where they can make money without worrying about attach rate (how many lenses the consumer buys).
As far as using legacy glass: Sony don't have medium format glass. At all. They've never built a medium format camera under their own name, and Minolta last made medium format in the 60s. Again, the grandparent hot take, and the upvotes, are coming from people who know zero about photography.
Either Sony are going to get into the medium format market for the first time (which seems unlikely to me, but you never know), or this is a sensor design for one or more of their MF customers (i.e. all the remaining medium format manufacturers - Hassleblad, Phase One, Pentax, and Fujifilm). I'd expect that if it's the latter there will either be adapters, or electronic compensation.
A curved image plane is more associated with box cameras like the Ansco Pioneer or with pinhole cameras, to either reduce curvature of field or vignetting. Most likely the curved sensor will reduce the complexity of the lens since it removes the necessity of creating a flat field.
It's certainly possible that Sony won't make their own camera, but will instead sell sensors to other manufacturers just as they do with APS-c sensors.
Someone was just explaining to me that the reason apple did M1 chips was so they could bake DRAM on to make it hard to upgrade DRAM on the macbook air. Ignore that Apple could have blocked that in a lot of much more inexpensive ways.
If sony wants to prevent legacy glass, they can do a little verifier chip in glass (that they don't actually make BTW) just like HP does with ink cartridges etc. They don't need to design a curved sensor to lock out stuff if they wanted (I don't see why they would care, they sell sensors not glass).
* Sony opens their E mount design to third party lens makers like Tamron, Tokina, Cosina, Sigma, etc
* Sony makes an adapter to mount legacy A-mount lenses
More lenses is a great plus when it comes to selling cameras.
Not that I don't agree with you in general, but that seems like a great way to tank sales and burn good-will. HP can get away with it because people don't do research and might actually believe that it's to protect the printer (or whatever). People that are buying thousand dollar cameras might be less amused.
If so, can curved wafers be made? Or start with a flat wafer and build up enough layers on top of it so that the surface is curved? Or make several tiny sensor pieces out of flat wafers, put them on a curved surface, and seamlessly connect them together? All of these ideas seem crazy, but they must have some way.
(This surprised me too, because manufacturing on silicon wafers with non-flat surfaces is very infeasible.)
Leica has already a medium format camera (S) with interchangeable lenses, its super expansive but a medium format Leica with fixed lens for (example) 9000$ I think would sell really a lot.
Also a Sony medium format for 7/8000€ would sell a lot (more than Leica surely). We’ll see...
https://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/cyber-shot-compact-camera...
If you could have a sensor with the correct curvature for the focal length of the lens, you don't need to correct field curvature anymore, which means that you need less glass and have higher quality.
If you have the wrong curvature for the focal length, some field correction will still be required, which defeats the advantage.
In the real world, it's even more than just focal length that changes the required curvature.
Plastic is easiest way to make a lens lighter and high end buyers are adverse to plastic. People buy lenses by the kilogram so to speak.
If you are willing to buy third party, maybe even Chinese lenses, they are getting cheaper. If we ever get a true variable curvature sensor, designing lenses will get so much easier and cheaper that I can see even more third party lenses of even higher quality, at an even *lower price.
In any case, I agree with the point about plastic lenses.
While I agree with you, the third-party lenses that have gotten notably better are Sigma’s, which are no longer cheaper, and are also just big ol’ chonkers now.
https://www.dpreview.com/products/Sigma/lenses/sigma_85_1p4_...
What's missing is even more AF and zoom.
35mm is a whole different scale of market with entirely different buyers. The entry point cost to medium format is more than the 99th percentile of 35mm like systems.
My best Sony E 18-55 is ever so slightly cocked out of alignment when at it's past ~45mm or so, yet you could never tell from the photos.
I would say Nikon lenses are pretty sturdy
That being said, most lens damage is in the filter thread or in optical alignment, metal vs plastic doesn't make that big of a difference.
So, for essentially equivalent glass, the M4/3 lens is more expensive than full-frame.
For the same price as your 12-40, there is the Tamron 28-75 f/2.8 for Sony FE, which captures four times as much light.
So no, glass really doesn't cost more for the larger sensor. Equivalent glass is often cheaper on Full-frame, which is why I went FF as I had a limited budget.
This is the reason why so many people are buying speedboosters, because FF lenses are often just better value.
This means that the lenses are equivalent. Indeed, the amount of light captured by a lens from a point source is proportional to the angle of the cone with its tip at the point and it's disk at the aperture. And so, since the FoV is the same, you will be at the same distance from the point for the same image, and since the diameter of the aperture is the same, the two cones will be identical, and thus the amount of light will be the same.
For depth of field, the calculation is similar, and they are indeed also equal.
And so, an f/5.6 aperture on FF is equal to an f/2.8 aperture on an M43 lens of the same FoV.
As a conclusion, your 12-40mm f/2. 8 lens is exactly equivalent to a 24-80 f/5.6 lens on FF. And so, a 28-75 f/3.5-5.6 lens on FF is faster in average but has a slightly smaller zoom range. In the end, the variable aperture lens is optically superior, at a third of the price.
As for the Tamron, it is indeed made of plastic, but I like this because it makes it lighter and barely less resistant as the G-Master. It is still capable of gathering four times more light.
If you want to actually test this, we can print two test charts and put them one meter from the camera then one meter from each other in a line, and you can take a picture of them at 25mm f/2.8 on your Olympus, I'll take the same picture at 50mm f/5.6 on my A7ii, and you'll see that the depth of field will be exactly the same. If we had a way of controlling lighting, we would see that at the same shutter speed the noise levels of the two images will be very similar too.
The light intensity at the same f number is indeed the case, however, since the image is smaller, then amount of light is four times smaller for an M4/3 lens at the same FoV. Another way to understand this is to realize that the focal length is smaller, therefore the image for the same object is smaller, therefore despite an equal light intensity the total light is the same.
DoF is not actually any different from lens speed. There is a physically indestructible link where increasing the amount of light from the same object reduce the depth of field. DoF and amount of light are two faces of the same coin.
I highly suggest actually doing the math. It's a very counter-intuitive concept. Take a point source of light, take some distance, then calculate the angle of the triangle formed by the point and the opposite points on the aperture. This angle is directly proportional to the light. You will see that the angle is equal in both.
Then, to explain why the ISO is going to be four times as high in the FF camera, calculate the intensity of the image by taking the source to now be a sphere, and calculating the image size using the thin lens equation. You will se that the image will be twice the size with the 50mm FF lens, and thus the light intensity will be half that, which is why ISO is going to be four times higher in the FF camera.
This is also why you can get away with ISOs four times on full-frame than on M4/3.
Again, if you don't believe me, you really have to do the math in your own, failing that you should do an experiment and look at the noise levels at the same shutter speed at f/2.8 vs f/5.6 in the same speed with equivalent focal lengths. You will see.
Another way to look at it is, if you have two setups with different sensor sizes, but the same relative aperture (i.e. f number), same ISO, same sensor resolution, and equivalent focal lengths (i.e. scaled by crop factor), you will have more noise in the image from the smaller sensor. As the parent stated, this is purely due to physics: the lens in the setup with the smaller sensor has a smaller absolute aperture; thus less total light is entering the camera.
Measuring lux at each sensor would provide similar readings.
For comparison, let's look at the most popular lens in the world, the 50mm. I'll focus on Canon's f/1.8 series of the nifty-fifty, just to keep consistent.
1975: $79.95 ($386.95 today)
1978: $67.95 ($271.37 today)
1986: $102 ($242.33 today)
1992: $44.95 ($83.42 today)
2014: $125 ($137.49 today)
Today: $94.00 (discontinued) or $125 (new model)
While the list price of the 50mm tends to sit in the $50-125 range, the inflation adjusted cost of this lens has dropped fairly consistently over the years. And remember that this is covering a pretty massive range of lens technology; a modern 50mm f/1.8 is lighter, focuses closer (0.35m vs 0.6m), has an extra diaphram blade in it (7 vs 6), contains several multi-coated glass elements, and has an auto focus motor built into the body of the lens. The value per dollar of a modern photo lens is genuinely massive compared to what was available in the past.
I think it's misleading to just look at Canon SLRs. SLRs are dying. Looking at the most modern mounts from all companies:
* Canon 50mm f/1.8 R-mount: $200
* Fuji 35mm f/2: $200
* Nikon 50mm $-mount f/1.8: on sale for $500 (normally $600)
* Olympus 25mm f/1.8: $300
* Panasonic 25mm f/1.8 MFT: On sale for $150 (normally $250)
* Panasonic 50mm f/1.4 L-mount: $2300 (although Sigma makes one for just $430).
* Sony 50mm f/1.8 E-mount: $250
I've adjusted to 50mm for crop factor.
I think the Canon f/1.8 50mm is sort of an outlier for low-cost in 2020. On the whole, prices have been creeping up (as has sharpness, AF speed, flare control, etc.). I feel like lenses are as expensive as they've been in decades.
By the by, I really don't get the rush to mirrorless. I hate electronic viewfinders, the really small bodies are hard to handle with bigger lenses, and the prices are outrageous. I'll probably keep using SLRs for the next 20-30 years.
Anyway, my on-the-spectrum reaction aside, I started exploring mirrorless because it facilitated making different types of pictures. Part of that facilitation was it's low cost. A used NEX-3, a fotodiox shift adapter (for K mount), and some old manual focus primes was all in for about $300. I got a camera with front shift that fit in a (largish) pocket. 14mp will about cover 10"x15" printed at 300dpi and is overkill for anything online.
I find manual focus with focus peaking satisfying. It's slower but when it misses it misses because of my technique not the way the camera interprets the scene. I don't get as many mis-focused pictures. I learn from those I get. The fixes are obvious. I don't feel I need to make more "just to be safe."
That's the biggest thing for me with mirrorless. My workflow has become much simpler. I don't take extra pictures just to be sure. I can see how the shadows and highlights will render in the viewfinder. I can adjust the contrast and saturation and color profile and white balance in camera while looking at the scene.
But, it's made me heretical. I no longer shoot RAW...though there are situations where I would...just JPG. My workflow is simpler because I don't spend time trying to fix pictures. Color, shadow, and highlights were either pretty close in camera or I didn't take it.
Even better for my workflow, JPG's are tiny. Memory cards don't fill up. Disks don't fill up. Downloads are faster. Backups are faster. And there are fewer files because I know that I got it when I made it.
But...I don't shoot sports anymore. I don't shoot wildlife anymore either. I'm not chasing birds in flight. My pictures were shifting as my gear was. Both still are. Mirrorless changed the way I was making pictures. The more a piece of gear does that, the more interested in it I am. YMMV.
I hate editing RAW files, but in 30 years, I'll still have them and might have a use for them. In 300 years, my ancestors will have them. Seems like image processing algorithms might advance by then.
I once reran my photos from the early '00s through a modern raw processor, and the difference was night-and-day. No tweaking, no nothing. Just modern versus ancient noise reduction, color algorithms, etc.
Disk space is cheap enough.
To put it another way the only difference is that my “archived negative” is a JPG rather than a RAW. But in 300 years I would only bet, and not very much, on physical prints. I’d give JPG a reasonable chance thirty years from now. Proprietary RAW files will probably be readily accessible in fifteen years for the most part.
Most of what JPG does is free me from a “raw+jpg just in case.” I don’t think defensively like that anymore...I don’t burden myself with a lot of “a serious photographer would.” What I am making is a picture. There are tradeoffs and the actual pictures I make (not the ones I might possibly make) are how I think about cost and benefit.
Disk space is cheap and so I use it write only. The time I spend on file management is expensive, so again write only. RAW + JPG requires much more file management than either alone. Should the JPG and RAW receive the same number of stars? The same tags? Always? I don’t want to spend time thinking about that.
For me, RAW represents an obligation to future work. The picture is never done when it is made. Not ready upon download.
JPG frees up energy for making more pictures. YMMV.
More studio oriented systems still tend to only offer primes.