Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Five New Lenses Show Samsung Is Serious About Mirrorless

As the first-party Micro Four Thirds makers dilly-dally with their lens lineup, Samsung is pumping out glass for its NX series like a rabbit pumps out, well, more rabbits. Here?s the lineup, containing five new lenses.

16mm ?2.4 (July)
60mm ?2.8 Macro (August)
85mm ?1.4 (October)
16-80mm ?3.5-4.5 OIS (December)
18-200mm ?3.5-6.3 OIS (May)

All of those focal lengths should be multiplied by 1.5 thanks to the crop factor of the NEx?s APS-C sensor. The zooms use silent motors and internals to keep them quiet for movie-shooting, and all of the lenses work with Samsung?s i-Function feature, which allows you to use a lens-surrounding ring on the body to control things like aperture.

Those zooms look fine, but I would have my eye on the primes. That 16mm ?pancake? looks particularly fun, with a fairly good maximum aperture and a 35mm-equivalent focal length of 53mm ? a ?normal? focal length.

The 60mm is a little pedestrian: A a 35mm equivalent of 90mm, it is the perfect portrait length lens, but a slightly wider maximum aperture would be nice. I assume this will be one of the cheeper lenses in the lineup (Samsung hasn?t yet announced prices). The 85mm ?1.4, though, is very interesting. That equates to almost 130mm, with the ridiculous light-gathering abilities of ?1.4 wide open. God knows what you?d use it for, but I imagine you?d get some stunning pictures.

The small-body, non-SLR market is getting hot. Samsung and Sony seems committed to bringing their own lenses, and while Panasonic and Olympus are being somewhat tardy with their own glass, the recent announcement that Carl Zeiss and Schneider-Kreuznach are going to make lenses for Micro Four Thirds shows a future there, too. It seems that more and more arguments for big-body SLRs are slipping away.

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