According to many rumors we received from different sources Panasonic will launch a the new P&S camera but also the long awaited 8mm f/3.5 fisheye lens. It will be smaller than any other 8mm lens on market (smaller than the Olympus 8mm f/3.5Olympus 8mm f/3.5
Olympus 8mm f/3.5
Olympus 8mm f/3.5
Olympus 8mm f/3.5
Olympus 8mm f/3.5
Olympus 8mm f/3.5
Olympus 8mm f/3.5
Olympus 8mm f/3.5
Olympus 8mm f/3.5
Olympus 8mm f/3.5
and the Sigma 8mm f/3.5
Sigma 8mm f/3.5
Sigma 8mm f/3.5
Sigma 8mm f/3.5
Sigma 8mm f/3.5
Sigma 8mm f/3.5
Sigma 8mm f/3.5
Sigma 8mm f/3.5
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Sigma 8mm f/3.5
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It doesn’t come with optical image stabilizer and it can’t take filter (like the Panasonic 7-14mm
We don’t know when the lens will be in Stock but we really hope Panasonic will not make us wait too long!
Via Photorumors:
The Panasonic FX75 will have 14MP and a Leica 24mm ultra-wide-angle f/2.2 Summicron lens with 5x optical zoom. The camera will support HD video in AVCHD Lite format. No RAW file format.
Keep following 43rumors!
23 Responses
any word on pricing for the 8mm?
Nice to see that the p&s cameras have more and more a big aperture
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When the standart p&s will have a aperture of 2,2 – what will have a lx4?
Min. f1,8…. 🙂
i presume this is not a circular fisheye?
more like a rectilinear (?) fisheye? please excuse my poor english.
Does that mean no 14mm f/2.5 MFT lens announcement?
No 14mm announcement 🙁
It’s a diagonal fisheye lens like Olympus ZD 8mm.
Yeah, not circular.
I’d like info on the pricing also!
Excellent news! Kudos to Panasonic for the lens lineup, all have been spot on. Hopefully, they rework the 25mm F1.4 to m4/3.
Nice job, Panasonic!
I would say Panny’s choices have been spot on, with one huge exception — price. I’m hoping the 8mm will begin a trend of more competitive pricing for m4/3, making it the clear choice for mirrorless digital.
Another stupid lens. 8mm fisheye is everyhere, cheap, and can be used EASILY on manual as DOF is very large. Everyone needs pancake lenses, portrait lenses, and fast zoom lenses for M4/3 now, not an redundant garbage like this. Wait until olympus announce its M4/3 fisheye and we have stupidly THREE fisheye in same system. Two manufacturers producing redundant lenses such as three standard zooms, two standard teles, two superzooms, two fisheye, what a waste.
Pfff, filling out the line with a specialty “gimmick” lens when there’s still no conventional fixed-focal-length wide angle and no fast-aperture portrait lens? The 20/1.7 is a terrific optic, but it’s getting lonely; it needs some companions in the product line. I am starting to think Micro Four Thirds ought to have a “lens czar” to make these companies concentrate their resources on what photographers actually need!
M4/3 is in the right track and is nice to see that we are getting a broad range of lenses that can AF during video operation. Adding a magic touch of creativity to video is getting easier thanks to the flexibility that M4/3 adds to the equation.
Whoa. What may be important to you may not be important to everyone else. Yes, m43 desperately needs a fast portrait lens and a conventional fixed wide-angle. But we have to look at who m43 is trying to target: amateurs who want “better image quality” and a camera that can do things their P&S can’t.
Can a P&S take a moderate wide-angle picture and a conventional portrait picture? Yes. Can it do ultra-wide? No.
Take a look at the kinds of pictures relatively new photographers like to take, and you’ll see tons of fish-eye photographs. Check the Flickr forums, look at the Lomography site, hell, even the U.S. Air Force website. Pick up a copy of a magazine that is not a pro photography journal that has a vast amount of photographs in it (car magazines, etc.) Point out how many of those photos are fish-eyes or ultra-wide-angles. Ask people looking at buying their first DSLRs why they are switching and what lens they would ultimately want to get if price was no object.
This is a good lens to have in the line-up, and it will attract many customers. Imagine the conversations at the camera counter. “The Nikon is nice, but the lenses are expensive. Yes, it is a little big. The Sony NEX series is really nice, but the Panasonic GF1 is really compact and, yes, it does have an ultra-wide-angle lens.”
What m43 needs now is an edge on people who will most likely buy their cameras. Most of those people aren’t lurking on 43rumors or hauling around 1Ds Mark IIIs and D3x’s with their glass keg of an 85mm or remarkably heavy retrofocal design aspherical 24mm lenses.
A non-zoom fisheye is really convenient for outdoor shots where you have to walk a few miles. Lighter the better. Combine with any of the M4/3 cameras and you have a really portable system.
But the price!!! YIKES!!! Seems like the less you get the more you have to pay.
Fisheye lenses like this are commonly used for spherical VR panoramic photography (like virtual tours etc). As someone who specializes in commercial VR photography, I am of course VERY interested in getting my hands on this little lens for my GF1 (I currently use Nikon gear as well). I only hope Panasonic did a better job with the optics than the much larger Olympus 8mm which suffers from excessive (not entirely correctable) CA and purple fringing, rendering the lens practically unusable for quality VR work.
Hopefully this means they have started to focus on lens production a bit more and we will see the 14/2.5 shortly. I am hopeful that the price tag for the fisheye is less than $500 (I’m conservatively hoping $399 with fingers crossed) as much more than that and I think it will really start to discourage potential mirrorless adopters. It’s one thing to get the lenses that many are clamoring for into production, but if they are priced higher than any other equivalent lens for other systems, it does the m4/3 system no favors. There will be people willing to spend twice as much for lenses as they would with another system (as we’ve seen with the current lenses) but to sway folks from the new Sonys and Samsungs, they’re going to have to get competitive. The market is no longer cornered and I really think that lenses are going to go a long way in providing an edge.
I hope that the old rumors surrounding the Oly 12mm pancake come to fruition. That is what I would love to see. 14mm would be great, but I would prefer a bit more room between it and my 20mm. While we’re at it, how about a 40 or 50mm f/2 (or faster) for all the portrait folks looking for a fast short tele pancake (or at least physically small) lens? Keep that one under $500 (as every other lens manufacturer does) and I think assuming it performs well optically, it would kill it. The wide angle prime and a short tele prime would be my two biggest wishes assuming they can also compete price wise with all the other lenses for other systems out there. This would also help to start rounding out the system providing truly versatile, and different tools. If Panny and Oly cannot figure out how to keep prices realistic, then I sure hope they solicit a third party to start building lenses with a dedicated m4/3 AF compatible mount.
C’mon Panoly!
what about that official photo of the lens that was here this mornig? 😛
To me the question is as follow : provided that the distortion is correctible in post processing, how much will this lens be the poor men’s 7-14 …?
@Chris: P&S can’t take portrait with SHALLOW depth of field. After all, if you can do it with P&S, why in the first place you choose larger sensor camera??? OK fisheye is nice but lets count the number of portrait pictures vs fisheye pictures… you’ll know that portrait lenses is more important than fisheye lens now. Portrait is difficult without AF, fisheye is easy to focus without AF. That’s why M4/3 needs portrait lens, it is the most M4/3 user FREAKING need now.
@Jules: I agree with you, the only reason for consider 8mm fisheye lens is in-camera processing for de-fish effect.
Sharp tikhnnig! Thanks for the answer.
@Abi : I tend to forget about jpeg shooters. I only use the LCD screen preview to see if its not a totally blown shot. Therefore I did not even think about in camera de-fishing.
But it could be a neat feature 😉
Wouldn’t de-fished shots have a slightly narrower field of view than the uncorrected 8mm shots? If so, it probably won’t be much more interesting as a “poor man’s 7-14” than the Olympus 9-18, which is already considerably smaller/lighter and less expensive than the 7-14.
Have the size/weight specs ever been published? From the photos, I gather that it might be smaller than the 9-18.
From the short history of Panasonic m4/3 lenses, I wouldn’t expect it to be inexpensive (though one can always hope — for another couple of days until the probable disappointment).