Thread: The Future's Bright

On 8 February, Sony announced that the specifications of the company's 'E-mount' would be made available to third party manufacturers. The press release that carried the announcement also carried endorsements from four lens manufacturers: Carl Zeiss, Cosina, Sigma and Tamron.

The most significant endorsement came from Tamron. The company's brief statement confirmed that Tamron 'aim to offer our customers new solutions and unprecedented photo-shooting enjoyment through the manufacture and sale of "E-mount" lenses.'

Today Sigma confirmed that they too will start manufacturing E-Mount lenses and M43 lenses: 'The Sigma Corporation is pleased to announce the development of new lenses for Micro Four Thirds and E-mount camera system.'

In fact Sigma already have a mock up of a future E-Mount lens on display at CP+. It does seem odd that the mock up is of a 30mm f2.8 lens since Sony already plan to introduce an E-Mount 30mm macro lens later this year. Still, we can hope that before too long Sigma and Tamron will both be offering E-Mount lenses that expand the options available to NEX users.

That both companies - the two biggest third party lens makers - believe there is money to made in developing and selling lenses for NEX and M43 suggests that they have plenty of confidence in the future of the mirrorless market.

Hopefully this will lead to some price competition as well, or at least some budget primes!

Every DSLR mount has some bargains, such as fast and sharp 50mm. It would be nice to have some lenses like this for the mirrorless formats to broaden the lens selection.

olli, can you explain the E mount concept to me a bit more? I'm pretty ignorant about this stuff. Will the E mount lenses have auto focus enabled?

BB,

E-mount is just Sony's lens system for the Nex cameras. They have A-mount or Alpha or whatever they're called for their DSLR and DSLT cameras and these are built around the phase detect AF systems in those cameras. The e-mount lenses are Nex specific and are designed around the contrast detect AF systems in the Nex line. Many of their A-mount lenses will work on the Nex cams with an adapter (much like the 4/3 lenses on m4/3 cameras), but the auto-focus will be very slow (like when you use a 4/3 lens on an m43 camera). The auto focus of the Nex system with their e-mount lenses is on a par with the m43 auto focus with the native m43 lenses except in the case of the GH2 which has taken a pretty large leap forward in AF speed, to mid-level DSLR standards. I'd imagine this means that the other m43 cameras and Nex cameras and any other mirrorless camera systems out there will be catching up to that standard over the next year or two. Very exciting times for mirrorless cameras!

Hope this helps rather than confuses....

-Ray

Definitely helped, Ray, thank you!