Here are two new patents from Sony and Olympus:
1) Sony patented a Z-shift moving sensor that can focus on all manual third party lenses! This means even an 40-50 year old lens can be used to autofocus. It’s not the lens that moves it’s the sensor! More at SonyAlphaForum.
2) Olympus will “copy” Sony’s lens-camera idea! Images showing a sort of Olympus version of the QX camera can be seen at Egami.
6 Responses
The return of the Contax AX!!
Good idea, even allows all lenses to make more or less makro shots. Put this thing now in a cassette that one can remove and change for another one, then we have the perfect gear, one body, a few sensor cassettes with different sensor sizes and pixel amounts. Now, imagine that all manufacturers would align on one single mount for mirrorless, what a pleasure to shoot at the world. Well, lets keep dreaming.
With this idea, sony could overcome the limited number of native lenses for its fe system. Well done!
That’s actually an old idea already tried by Contax in the film era. Obvious limitations concerned long lenses and speed wasn’t all that great but technology has moved on so, who knows?
I didn’t know you Americans can sue a lens into submission(autofocus)…. ?
Autofocus with sensor will have limitations of course, you can’t move the sensor far enough to focus all lenses and many lenses are fixed rear element so moving sensor could impact how lens performs. What it could be good for is tweaking final focus. User was off a bit so will adjust it to focus on the face. This would be great for something like f/1.4, which I can usually get close enough with viewfinder in my A7R, but there is margin of error so hit rate isn’t as high as it could be.