The big Japanese market photo show starts this week, and there have been a lot of announcements and re-announcements and development announcements that need some commentary:
- Business as usual at Canon. Canon continues to think that the name of the game is a flood of compacts and more DSLR iteration. Supposedly, Canon has one more announcement coming in the short term, and I'd guess that would have to be the 1DsIV. But who knows, maybe they'll surprise us and get on the mirrorless bandwagon.
- m4/3 proliferates. With Schneider and Zeiss announcing that they'll join m4/3, everyone is now over excited about the format. Don't read too much into this. While it's nice to see that we're getting more independent makers into the mount, the likely prices and capabilities of new lenses is going to be specialist, not generalist. We'll get expensive fast primes out of these companies, and probably in a dribble. The announcements are more about two small lens companies looking for additional growth, not that the m4/3 mount is suddenly mainstream and going to have lots of new choices. In the end, m4/3 still has a size penalty at its core, and most of the action that will deal with that is at the sensor level. That's why we need Fujifilm to get off the pot and create a m4/3 camera with their top sensor capabilities. Ditto Kodak.
- C-mount arrives. Why it took so long I have no idea, but Kenko has announced the first C-mount camera, though judging by the prototypes, they have a long way to go to get to production. C-mount is an old video mount that was highly popular in the 70's thru 90's when sensors were all small, and is still popular with security cameras. There's a large number of existing (and some quite good) C-mount lenses in the used market, and many of them are inexpensive. I've wondered for years now why someone didn't try to exploit them.
- Mirrorless updates? It's not likely we'll see any mirrorless announcements at CP+, though there are at least five significant ones lingering in the background, so we may hear talk about one or more of them. The five? Panasonic G3, Olympus EP-?, Sony NEX-7, Pentax Mini (2.7x), and the long-rumored Nikon offering.
- Nikon Coolpix. More on that shortly, as Nikon's announcements will occur later tomorrow.