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Nobody going to talk to chromatic aberration? Curved surface of the CCD can fix a lot of this, could improve Q of the image by some margin, save sw costs to fix it in RAW.
Also: MEMS: make it active, fix shake in the focal plane, not in the lens. Simpler lens, cheaper to make
This is likely being done for business reasons rather than technical reasons. It would prevent the use of any "legacy glass" which a lot of medium-format shooters have been collecting over the decades. One would have to buy an entirely new lens collection at the cost of many thousands of dollars.
I think it's still more technical than business... corners have been an issue for many cameras (especially digital) and curvature is one way to solve that problem. In fact this tends to be -more- of a problem using Legacy glass on Mirrorless systems today.
I also doubt it will prevent the use of 'legacy glass'. If there's one thing my experience with Sony mounts has taught me, -somebody- will make an adapter. Yes, it may involve another element or two in the path to rectify. But I would be -shocked- if Sony didn't have a path here; a decent amount of e-mount adoption has been thanks to the adaptability of the system, and my guess is they can easily price this in a product where they can make money without worrying about attach rate (how many lenses the consumer buys).
Exactly. A tremendous amount of the complexity of lens design - and hence the size of the lens and quality of the output - is in the need to flatten the image across the recording medium without creating excessive distortion. Seeing it in terms of a sales of is the kind of garbage hot take I'd expect from people knowing nothing about photography.
As far as using legacy glass: Sony don't have medium format glass. At all. They've never built a medium format camera under their own name, and Minolta last made medium format in the 60s. Again, the grandparent hot take, and the upvotes, are coming from people who know zero about photography.
Either Sony are going to get into the medium format market for the first time (which seems unlikely to me, but you never know), or this is a sensor design for one or more of their MF customers (i.e. all the remaining medium format manufacturers - Hassleblad, Phase One, Pentax, and Fujifilm). I'd expect that if it's the latter there will either be adapters, or electronic compensation.
The reference to legacy glass isn't to Sony legacy glass, but to the likes of Mamiya, Hasselblad, Pentax, Pentacon and others. A tremendous variety of adapters are available to adapt almost every removable mount lens format to the Sony E mount for their APS-c and full frame sensors.
A curved image plane is more associated with box cameras like the Ansco Pioneer or with pinhole cameras, to either reduce curvature of field or vignetting. Most likely the curved sensor will reduce the complexity of the lens since it removes the necessity of creating a flat field.
It's certainly possible that Sony won't make their own camera, but will instead sell sensors to other manufacturers just as they do with APS-c sensors.
This type of comment is literally on every post about any business on HN :)
Someone was just explaining to me that the reason apple did M1 chips was so they could bake DRAM on to make it hard to upgrade DRAM on the macbook air. Ignore that Apple could have blocked that in a lot of much more inexpensive ways.
If sony wants to prevent legacy glass, they can do a little verifier chip in glass (that they don't actually make BTW) just like HP does with ink cartridges etc. They don't need to design a curved sensor to lock out stuff if they wanted (I don't see why they would care, they sell sensors not glass).
> If sony wants to prevent legacy glass, they can do a little verifier chip in glass (that they don't actually make BTW) just like HP does with ink cartridges etc.
Not that I don't agree with you in general, but that seems like a great way to tank sales and burn good-will. HP can get away with it because people don't do research and might actually believe that it's to protect the printer (or whatever). People that are buying thousand dollar cameras might be less amused.
Not to mention that
* Sony opens their E mount design to third party lens makers like Tamron, Tokina, Cosina, Sigma, etc
* Sony makes an adapter to mount legacy A-mount lenses
More lenses is a great plus when it comes to selling cameras.
There are good technical reasons for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petzval_field_curvature
How would they actually manufacture this? Camera sensors are basically chips, so they are made out of silicon wafers, right?
If so, can curved wafers be made? Or start with a flat wafer and build up enough layers on top of it so that the surface is curved? Or make several tiny sensor pieces out of flat wafers, put them on a curved surface, and seamlessly connect them together? All of these ideas seem crazy, but they must have some way.
backgrinding - similar to how back illuminated sensors are made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-illuminated_sensor
Apparently, it's possible to bend existing flat sensors! The backgrinding makes them thin enough to bend. Bending uses high-precision air pressure setups or something. [1]
(This surprised me too, because manufacturing on silicon wafers with non-flat surfaces is very infeasible.)
The big issue with this design is that it would be necessary to change the curvature as the focal length changes. If they can get that working reliably, it would be an absolute game changer - lenses would get much cheaper, much lighter, and of higher quality too.
Lenses never get cheaper. Look at micro four thirds. At the high end they don’t get lighter except for really long wide lenses. That’s because they got heavier when autofocus was added. The original manual focus Nikon 500mm f4 “only” weighs 3kg. It’s lighter than the current $12k model which shed about 2.4kg since the first autofocus version.
Plastic is easiest way to make a lens lighter and high end buyers are adverse to plastic. People buy lenses by the kilogram so to speak.
Lenses absolutely get cheaper if you look at the lenses that are actually bought and sold in any number. The number of people using a 500mm f/4 is vanishingly small, and wondering about their price is a bit like asking why Ferraris still cost a lot.
For comparison, let's look at the most popular lens in the world, the 50mm. I'll focus on Canon's f/1.8 series of the nifty-fifty, just to keep consistent.
1975: $79.95 ($386.95 today)
1978: $67.95 ($271.37 today)
1986: $102 ($242.33 today)
1992: $44.95 ($83.42 today)
2014: $125 ($137.49 today)
Today: $94.00 (discontinued) or $125 (new model)
While the list price of the 50mm tends to sit in the $50-125 range, the inflation adjusted cost of this lens has dropped fairly consistently over the years. And remember that this is covering a pretty massive range of lens technology; a modern 50mm f/1.8 is lighter, focuses closer (0.35m vs 0.6m), has an extra diaphram blade in it (7 vs 6), contains several multi-coated glass elements, and has an auto focus motor built into the body of the lens. The value per dollar of a modern photo lens is genuinely massive compared to what was available in the past.
Well, the low point seems to be 1992 at $88. Which sort of matches my experience.
I think it's misleading to just look at Canon SLRs. SLRs are dying. Looking at the most modern mounts from all companies:
* Canon 50mm f/1.8 R-mount: $200
* Fuji 35mm f/2: $200
* Nikon 50mm $-mount f/1.8: on sale for $500 (normally $600)
* Olympus 25mm f/1.8: $300
* Panasonic 25mm f/1.8 MFT: On sale for $150 (normally $250)
* Panasonic 50mm f/1.4 L-mount: $2300 (although Sigma makes one for just $430).
* Sony 50mm f/1.8 E-mount: $250
I've adjusted to 50mm for crop factor.
I think the Canon f/1.8 50mm is sort of an outlier for low-cost in 2020. On the whole, prices have been creeping up (as has sharpness, AF speed, flare control, etc.). I feel like lenses are as expensive as they've been in decades.
These are also all new mounts, while the SLR mounts are decades old. If there's anything we would expect to reset the cost of equipment, it's a new and incompatible mount which saps the used market of its entire supply and lets manufacturers to charge higher rates for new and shiny gear. Also, inflation adjusted a lot of those are still cheaper than the original 1971 lens, despite having more features.
By the by, I really don't get the rush to mirrorless. I hate electronic viewfinders, the really small bodies are hard to handle with bigger lenses, and the prices are outrageous. I'll probably keep using SLRs for the next 20-30 years.
That is true. That being said, there is a renaissance in third party lenses, and their quality as well as their autofocus performance is increasing, fast.
If you are willing to buy third party, maybe even Chinese lenses, they are getting cheaper. If we ever get a true variable curvature sensor, designing lenses will get so much easier and cheaper that I can see even more third party lenses of even higher quality, at an even *lower price.
In any case, I agree with the point about plastic lenses.
That being said, there is a renaissance in third party lenses, and their quality as well as their autofocus performance is increasing, fast.
While I agree with you, the third-party lenses that have gotten notably better are Sigma’s, which are no longer cheaper, and are also just big ol’ chonkers now.
https://www.dpreview.com/products/Sigma/lenses/sigma_85_1p4_...
Ah, I'm not really thinking of Sigma, I'm talking of Neewer, Viltrox, Mitakon, and in some respects Tamron, and so on. They are making very good primes nowadays, and Viltrox even makes good AF primes now.
What's missing is even more AF and zoom.
Third party medium format system lenses are not something I see when browsing. Though I would not be stunned to come across a Vmount product. I would attribute most of it to market size and adapters for the mirrorless systems and maybe the availability of used 645 lenses.
35mm is a whole different scale of market with entirely different buyers. The entry point cost to medium format is more than the 99th percentile of 35mm like systems.
I now see the Fuji G series has third party lenses.
My m43 lenses are cheaper than my E Mount lenses. 12-40 2.8 Olympus lens is less than half the price of a Sony lens with the equivalent focal length. Most my e Mount lenses are over $1k and all but one of my m43s lenses are under $1k. Glass cost more for the larger sensor.
Your Olympus 12-40 is slower everywhere but in the teleend but has a larger zoom range than my Sony FE 28-70 f/3.5-5.6, however my lens comes at a third of the cost.
So, for essentially equivalent glass, the M4/3 lens is more expensive than full-frame.
For the same price as your 12-40, there is the Tamron 28-75 f/2.8 for Sony FE, which captures four times as much light.
So no, glass really doesn't cost more for the larger sensor. Equivalent glass is often cheaper on Full-frame, which is why I went FF as I had a limited budget.
This is the reason why so many people are buying speedboosters, because FF lenses are often just better value.
Constant 2.8 is faster than the variable aperture lens you posted. It is equivalent to the GMaster 24-70 or the canon L 24-70 at less than half the price. Its not on the same level as a Tamron, it’s made of machined aluminum and feels solid. Tamron is made out of plastic.
I don't mind the plastic lenses I use on my D5600, but I know they wouldn't survive bumping into something. People who do it professionally bump into stuff and won't always be where they can replace it, so they need sturdier material.
I didn't really mean that the lens barrel would be plastic - I think that a healthy mix of fiber reinforced plastics and metals is the best - I was also thinking of optical elements themselves being plastic, which allows for much cheaper prices.
That being said, most lens damage is in the filter thread or in optical alignment, metal vs plastic doesn't make that big of a difference.
My old D3100 and its kit, plastic 18-55 lens have been through hell and back. It's knocked into more things than I can count hanging over my shoulder or around my torso. I recently sold the system to a friend and had the chance to test it out, it still works great
I would say Nikon lenses are pretty sturdy
The bumper on your car is probably plastic. It will survive 1500 kg moving at 8kmh. If you bang a lens, the most likely breakage will be the precision optical system going out of whack. By the time the housing cracks, that’s likely to have already happened as well.
Even then it might take a bit before you even notice or -care-.
My best Sony E 18-55 is ever so slightly cocked out of alignment when at it's past ~45mm or so, yet you could never tell from the photos.
I don’t get that. The existing flat sensors don’t change curvature as focal length changes?
That's because current lenses correct field curvature so that the image plane is flat. This takes extra glass and can degrade image quality.
If you could have a sensor with the correct curvature for the focal length of the lens, you don't need to correct field curvature anymore, which means that you need less glass and have higher quality.
If you have the wrong curvature for the focal length, some field correction will still be required, which defeats the advantage.
In the real world, it's even more than just focal length that changes the required curvature.
Will it defeat the advantage or lessen it? For example, some people still need glasses after LASIK but still opt for it since they get end up with needing weaker lenses.
No, absolutely. The sensor is flat and when you change the focal length, the sensor gets the same “light/illumination”. That is the plus of a curved sensor: better image/photo at the border of the frame because there is always the same distance between the lens and the sensor.
Maybe they’re developing a fixed lens camera like the Leica Q or the old (defunct) R1XR.
Is it defunct? It's still listed on their website.
https://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/cyber-shot-compact-camera...
Maybe Sony is still salling it but was coming out 4/5 years ago without updates. I don’t know who want to buy it instead an A7
It still has unparalleled small size. The a7C is a nice alternative but it's not 42 megapixels. And there are not many compact 35mm lenses with good image quality, and the compact ones tend to be f/2.8 rather than f/2.
Maybe! A fixed lens médium format caméra would be very... Interesting to the very least.
It was not unheard-of back in the film days. The cameras, like the Fuji GW690, were not exactly small, but you could carry them around on a neck-strap and use them without a tripod.
True, but the inherent costs of a medium format sensor (not even taking into account the likely extra costs of a curved sensor) mean that the bare minimum you could sell this fixed-lens camera for would be several thousand dollars. I just don't see a lot of photographers being willing to drop that much money on a camera that they can never expand the capabilities of.
I'm excited about the potential of this but I really hope they don't pull an A-mount on E-mount.
Has this ever been tried with a traditional but curved silver halide surface?
Interesting. How would zoom work?
The lenses are currently designed to focus onto a flat plane - its actually no different to design them to focus onto a curved sensor, apart from the camera and lenses can be made smaller... I’m surprised smartphone cameras don’t do this for that reason.
I don't think zoom lenses are very common on medium format cameras.
About a third of the Fuji GFX lenses are zooms. They're less common than for small format cameras, but certainly have a place.
Since the Pentax 645 in the 1980’s, medium format zooms have not been uncommon. That’s about when 35mm zooms really took off. The new Fuji G system has zooms and Richo-Pentax has created new zooms in the last decade...and still sells FA models from the late 1990’s.
More studio oriented systems still tend to only offer primes.
Not sure how curved sensor would prevent zooming? (In any sense/implementation of that word)