BasiliskFilm

An argument in favour of Sony's EyeAF - if we ever get an AF f1.2 lens it will be essential. Not a big deal with an f4 zoom though.

If focus can be controlled remotely, accurately, repeatably and electronically, does a focus puller really need a cogwheel attached to the lens any more? Maybe there is no compatible device yet, but it should be possible.

For video, a compact 16mm prime would cover UWA and WA with a APS-C crop turned on. To be honest I would be happy with a MF lens and using range-focusing/hyperfocal distance for most UWA purposes, as shallow DOF is rarely achievable. A 28-75mm f2.8 zoom and a 105mm f2.8 macro/portrait lens. Also bung in a 50mm f1.2 AIS lens for effect and you have a pretty lightweight/affordable kit for most purposes.

I am not worried about hundreds of lenses. I am happy mounting adapted lenses for special purposes, and obviously all my manual focus lenses will be fine. If the F mount lenses focus at native speeds, there is not even any need for long wildlife lenses; a Z mount version of those is hardly going to be much more compact. What I really need though is an affordable, practical, compact, lightweight f2.8 run and gun standard lens like the Tamron 28-75. We know it can be done.

I can see the commercial logic in keeping your mount specs proprietary, to give an incentive to camera owners to buy the lenses. But apart from perhaps the f4 zoom, the offering is on the expensive side. If I go down this route I will probably be mostly adapting lenses, and if the AF performance of adapted F mount lenses is close to as good as native lenses then it is not like you are tying yourself into an untested platform. Now Sigma and Tamron are coming up with original and affordable FE mount designs, I just hope that Z mount versions are not far behind, and that they provide native performance - it is still too early to guess.

Yes it would be nice to have compatibility for stills, but noise and focus juddering would be no use for video AF. On the other hand my AI/S lenses should be fine - I think there is still aperture coupling on the adaptor? Ironically the main reason I would dither is actually to do with Tamron. The new E mount 28-75 f2.8 looks for an excellent base configuration for budget run-and-gun use on the A7III. Will there be a Nikon version? The 24-70 f4 looks fine but a bit unexciting.

At least Canon video shooters can go mirrorless happy in the thought that they can keep their beloved 1.7 crop... If the evidence continues to grow that adapted lenses on the Z series work well, then the mirrorless option looks increasingly attractive for video shooters. Sadly many of my D series lenses with lovely aperture rings will become MF only if I go that way, by the looks of things, unless they bring out a screw drive adaptor. For video use I doubt they would ever be smooth enough to use in AF mode anyway.

The Z6 seems to be staying under wraps for the time being. I guess if it gets launched with fully stable and optimised firmware then that might be a good thing.

If AF is a linear function, then the density of AF points on the Z6 is 3/4 that on the Z7, which doesn't sound as bad as "about half". As the sensor density is about 8K rather than 6K that is about what you would need for the extra stills resolution. Does the Z7 even process data from all the focus points in full frame video? Maybe it skips some like it does with the pixel readout for the image. Maybe the AF points are a bit larger on the Z6, allowing more accuracy in low light. There are various reasons not to worry about the Z6 until we have seen it at work. One thing we can probably agree on is that Nikon made a bit of a pig's ear of the whole launch thing. Having failed to address the obvious user questions early on, the good news about video quality, low light performance, AF performance etc has taken a while to emerge!

If the z7@4K is lineskipping, it may be able to read out the sensor faster than the z6@4K which is downsampling 6K. So I would imagine it will be worst for rolling shutter. The work-around if you need to shoot fast-moving stuff could be to shoot APS-C mode which is 1:1 4K on the z6 and could be about half the readout time.

Hand-held AF straight out of the camera, all at f4. I had thought the 24-70 was a bit disappointing as an initial offer, but obviously good for some jobs

An F2 standard zoom? - if I was only a stills shooter I would be mighty tempted. Which is probably the headline Canon wanted. But if we are back to unstabilised heavily cropped 4K video then Canon has again ducked out of that competition, and possibly they don't care.

30 MP and full sensor readout for 4K? Seems unlikely from Canon.

My thought on lenses. If the performance of adapted F mount glass is near-native (including 3rd party F mount) , particularly for action photography, then this becomes a very attractive hybrid platform. Second, the Z6 seems competitive (compared to A7III), but native glass is pretty pricey. On Sony the Tamron 28-75 makes for a budget/quality/lightweight option, so Nikon/Tamron needs to make that happen too. An f4 zoom is not enough, I might as well shoot on ASPC. The fact that Tamron waited until Nikon and Canon were bringing out full frame mirrorless to produce a FF zoom lens suggests they were not only thinking of selling this lens on E-mount.

So we unfold the optics with mirrorless cameras, and end up folding them in smartphones. I can't keep up

You could make a smaller sensor with an effectively longer lens (in equivalence terms). Or you could just make the sensor denser, for improved digital zoom; certainly for 1080p shooting. This certainly won't help with low light shooting, but maybe multiple cameras can work together to improve noise reduction. At the longer end parallax differences are less significant.

The Light L16 is probably the Apple Newton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton) of photography. Too many cameras/lenses and not enough processing. But it is probably showing the way ahead, when good small sensors cost a tiny fraction of the price of good large sensors.

I think we are stuck with small sensors on phones - anything bigger and the lens scales up too and you won't get it in your pocket. To me the main question is can they get away from infinite DOF? Portrait mode on my iPhone 7+ fools most folk most of the time, but that is stills only, and I imagine we are still a couple of cycles away from getting that stable and reliable enough for full-time video mode. Close inspection usually reveals the odd artefact, and with moving subjects that will probably happen all the time. Maybe next generation of processing, and 3 cameras rather than 2 and we will get there. I also imagine that computational imaging will increasingly bear down on noise - inter-frame noise reduction, combining images from multiple sensors - there may be options for cleaning up low light video.

I am never cutting edge with phones, but have just got a iPhone 7 plus and have a couple of observations. I have been using it to film barn owls in flight. OK that sounds a bit insane, but the direction of travel with this tech is clear. 1. Higher density sensor with improved digital zoom - at least for decent light conditions and HD resolution, and better processing for noise reduction. 2. Extra lenses - we already have 28mm, 56mm equiv. (I think) so why not 110? Blending the output of more than one camera opens up all sorts of possiblities. 3. Combined optical and digital stabilisation - filming at 6x zoom on my iPhone (is that around 180mm equiv?), one handed, and it is still remarkably smooth. 4. Usable, and suprisingly directional audio from a tiny microphone. 5. Very adequate, intelligent and responsive video AF. It isn't going to challenge the top of the range, but it will certainly push out a lot of the mid market competition.

I think you pay the extra tax. Panasonic assume most folks are buying for video or hybrid use, if you were just shooting stills you wouldn't need the GH5.

Like most hybrid cameras, recording over 30 mins is deliberately disabled to keep it taxed differently from a video camera. I imagine the work-around is to use an external recorder, and a SSD drive is probably a more cost-effective way of capturing that amount of footage anyway. The camera might need extra power too.

There is always the option of putting an EVF in the current DSLR bodies, like Sony did with the A mount series, while developing a new "Z mount" range. At some point the components for an EVF and on-sensor PDAF will be cheaper than worrying about all that flappy mirror and AF module stuff. Maybe looking at the smaller bodies like the D3000 or D5000 series, that are currently mostly used with a fairly limited range of lenses so no need for screw drive motor etc.

So what we are looking for is a retractable mount that works with short flange distance compact mirrorless lenses, existing F mount lenses, and provides auto focus for old Nikkors. Sorted.

Sony have an A to E mount adaptor that works with Minolta/Sony screw driven auto focus lenses. No reason why you couldn't put a motor in an adaptor as there is plenty of space between a short flange mirrorless and the back of a Nikon F mount lens. Of course there could be a cheaper adaptor for the current lenses that only use electronic (not mechanical) coupling. Part of the appeal of Nikon is that you can still use 40 year old lenses (and many of them are gems) as they have kept the same mount, but it is a bit of a technical headache going forward.

Apparently we are only 15 years away from commercially viable nuclear fusion reactors. Funny, but when I went on a tour of the Joint European Torus 35 years ago they said we were about 15-20 years ago from commercially viable nuclear fusion reactors then too.