Out of Las Vegas come a clutch of new lenses from Sigma. The best thing about Sigma lenses is that they can be bought to fit most of the major camera brands, unlike offerings from the camera makers themselves which are a lot less promiscuous.
The standout glass from Sigma comes in the form of two fixed maximum aperture lenses. These keep the same lens opening size throughout the zoom range instead of getting dimmer the farther you zoom. We have a 10-20mm F3.5 EX DC HSM and a 24-70mm ƒ2.8 IF EX DG HSM. Allow me to translate.
OS means "Optical Stabilizer", which stops your shots from blurring even with the morning hangover shakes. EX doesn’t stand for anything. It is Sigma’s badge for its better made lenses and probably meant to evoke the word "excellent". HSM means "Hyper-Sonic Motor", the fast, internal motors which drive the autofocus. Finally, DG is Sigma’s designation for full frame and 35mm film cameras, known as FX elsewhere, and DC lenses are made for cropped-sensor cameras. Phew!
There are also a few new variable aperture lenses — an 18-250mm ƒ3.5-6.3 OS, an 18-50mm ƒ2.8-4.5 DC OS HSM and a 50-200mm ƒ4-5.6 DC OS HSM. They are slowly popping up on Sigma’s site, but are as yet unencumbered with prices.
Camera buffs are in for a treat this week — there are plenty of new models coming out of the PMA show in Las Vegas. The latest is from Sony, which has just announced a new superzoom hybrid camera, the DSC-HX1.
The “superzoom” in question is a 20x optical one, and the camera comes fully loaded with 2009 buzz-functions: smile detection, “Intelligent Auto” (the camera knows what it is taking a picture of and selects the exposure mode accordingly), and what we call the Eyes Wide Shut mode, where the camera “a takes two pictures simultaneously and saves the one in which the eyes are the least closed.” We love the weasel-term “least closed”. There is also a panorama mode which shoots a bunch of photos at high speed and stitches them in-camera.
What may set the HX1 apart, though, is its sensor, a new CMOS model called the Exmor. It’s big, at 1/2.4-inch, and promises to give some low-noise, low-light performance. Remember — Sony makes the sensors for the extraordinary, see-in-the-dark Nikon D3 and D700. This commitment to image quality is reflected in the pixel count: a relatively modest 9.1MP. In fact, the specs list the top ISO as 3200, a number usually saved for the emergency-only custom settings.
Throw in a G lens – Sony’s high-end glass – and a 1080p movie mode and this is starting to look like a nice hybrid cam. And at $500 list, it could be a big hit.
Samsung’s new NX series of cameras could be awesome or awful. The cameras are something of a hybrid between the SLR and the compact — similar, in fact, to the Micro Four Thirds System.
The most important thing to know is that these cameras will have big sensors with which to mop up photons. Not full frame, 35mm-sized sensors but healthy APS-sized sensors, the kind found in all but the highest end DSLR. The NX camera manages to be a lot smaller than an SLR though by doing away with the mirror, and therefore the space-hogging mirror box.
The sacrifice is, of course, the optical, TTL viewfinder. Samsung could plunk a compact-style viewfinder on top, but this will never see the exact same angle as the lens. Instead, the NX cameras will have an electronic viewfinder, a truly horrible compromise. Anyone who has used a camera with an electronic ‘finder will know just how crappy they can be — you get the dizzying sense that you are looking into a 1980s camcorder eyepiece.
There is at least a big screen on the back of the prototype which should help, and future models could indeed have proper optical viewfinders. The first NX will hit stores in the second half of the year, for an unannounced price. We hope it’s cheap — a good DSLR can be had for a few hundred bucks these days.
PMA, the Las Vegas photography show, is in full swing — in fact, the news started trickling from the camera manufacturers last week. We begin with a slew of new RAW camera software, from both Apple and Adobe.
Apple’s announcement is limited to a simple Camera RAW update which means the Mac will now work with the Nikon D3X and the curious Epson R-D1x, the retro rangefinder announced last week.
Adobe’s offering is a little more exciting. There are new versions of both Camera RAW and Lightroom (5.3 and 2.3 respectively). Both have been around as public betas for a little while, but these are the fully baked official versions. The main changes are support for the D3X and Olympus’ E-30, along with some bug fixes (mostly Windows).
The irony of these updates being released at the beginning of PMA is that there are sure to be plenty of new cameras announced, none of which will yet work with either Aperture or Lightroom.
Sony has finally shown its cards for PMA this year, and that Ten of Clubs up its sleeve looks to be the CyberShot DSC-HX1 we heard about last week. According to the presser, it’s the company’s first digital camera with sweep panorama technology for up to 224-degree horizontal and 154-degree vertical panorama shots with the push of a button. It’s also sporting a 20x optical zoom, 1/2.4-inch Exmor CMOS sensor for 10 frames per second at 9.1 megapixel resolution, a Sony G lens and 1080p HD movie recording. Look for it this March for around five Benjamins.
Picture a closed circuit television (CCTV)- like system for your home. You can put cameras in any number of rooms, hook them all up and watch those feeds from anywhere using the internet. That’s exactly what Avaak, a San Deigo, California-based company has launched.
Called Vue personal video network, the system brings real-time remote video viewing technology to users who want to stay visually connected from anywhere, says the company.
The Vue will be of interest to users who want a easy, out of the box solution to monitor different rooms in their house. Say you have pets you leave alone for a day or two and would like to monitor them. You can rig a webcam to watch a room but extending it to multiple rooms and making all the feeds accessible requires quite some tech skills. Vue makes the process simple.
Vue has a network of small, battery-powered wireless cameras that come with a “peel and stick” magnetic mount. The mounts allow the cameras to be placed anywhere. The cameras can transmit an estimated one million frames on a single battery, says Avaak which launched the product at the DEMO 09 conference Monday. The cameras have a range of up to 300 feet and can be extended with optional repeaters.
To watch the feeds, users just log onto a private online account and can record, schedule and share it with family and friends. The system is browser based so consumers can view their home or business from any laptop or Flash-enabled cellphone, says Avaak. However, Vue currently supports only the IE 7.0 browser. Users get 2 Gigabytes of online storage with each system.
Vue also comes with the ability to upload and share video or still images to sites such as Flickr and YouTube. The entire system will retail for $300 and will start shipping in early summer, says Avaak.
The Brits are getting shafted again. We’ve reported many times already about the drop in value of the Great British Pound against, well, against pretty much every currency, and the knock-on effect of increased gadget prices.
Now, though, Sigma has bumped a lens price by £8,000, or around $11,400 in today’s money. To be sure, this isn’t a cheap $200 that has suddenly rocketed in price — the 200-500mm f/2.8 APO EX DG HSM was already a stunning $16,000 ($22,800) at launch. Still, a 50% price hike is huge, resulting in an MSRP of £24,000 ($34,200)
We haven’t covered this rather specialist lens before so, to save you having to Google it, here are some fun facts: The lens weighs 15.7 Kg (34.6 lbs) and has so much glass inside that it needs its own internal battery pack (rechargeable) to focus it. The lens even has its own LCD display to show you the current focal length and focus distance.
This is the beautiful new R-D1xG from Epson, and the odd, old fashioned outside is reflected on the inside. The camera is an update of Epson’s old R-D1.
The retro body is a rangefinder camera, which means manual focusing using the matched images familiar to anyone who has used a film rangefinder. It even takes Leica lenses, making it a passable alternative to Leica’s own M8, and cheaper at $3000. Weirdly, Epson hasn’t upped the pixel-count of the CCD sensor — it still holds just 6MP. This could either be fantastic news (a new, ultra low-light sensor) or terrible (old, 2006 technology).
The camera has had a few more tweaks — the handgrip is new, the shutter release feels slightly different, the camera now supports the Adobe RGB color space and will record images in RAW and JPEG simultaneously onto SDHC cards.
The weird styling of the top plate is still there, though: The on/off switch is shaped like a film camera wind-on lever and the old rewind knob has been re-purposed as a jog dial.
It looks like being Japan-only right now, but it’ll be very interesting to see just what that 6MP can do. Available now.
When most of us talk digital cameras, we talk megapixels, ISO, image noise, shot-per-second speed and image processing. We’re tech geeks. But really, none of that stuff matters as much as your camera’s lens.
The lens is, after all, your camera’s eyeball—the image sensor or film can only record what comes in through the lens. It’s what defines the picture’s perspective, clarity and way more.
Lenses are actually a really complicated thing to talk about—if your job was to steer photons through tunnels of stretched glass, people would call you complicated too—so we’re gonna try to keep it to field basics, you should know to get around, rather than dive into the crazy physics and mathematical ratios and stuff.
Lens Terminology Before we get into the basic lens types, you should know the two major numbers you’re looking at you when you talk about lenses: Focal length and aperture.
Focal length is the distance between the optical center of the lens and the point where it focuses the light coming into the lens (when a shot is in focus, that’s the image sensor or film). The diagram above, from Cambridge In Colour shows, very simply, what focal length refers to, and how it affects your pitchas. Here’s another pretty excellent, easy to understand explanation, with pictures showing the results of using different focal lengths on the same shot.
Practically, what you need to know is that focal length measured in millimeters, and that’s where you get, say, an 18-55mm lens, a 400mm telephoto or a 28-560mm lens found in a super-zoom camera. (You probably know this, but when you see “20x zoom lens,” the spec refers to the ratio of the longest focal length to the shortest—so 560 divided by 28.) Basically, the longer the focal length, the more magnified or “zoomed in” your photo can be.
Aperture is the other major spec on a lens, and something you deal with most on DSLRS. The aperture is the hole that actually lets the light into the camera, and you make can make it bigger or smaller. The size of the hole is expressed in terms of F-stops, or as you might see a lot F/2.8 or F2.8 or F8 or F11 or whatever.
The bigger the F number, the smaller the aperture, or hole. The smaller the number, the bigger the hole, which means the more light it lets in. The reason that’s good is that means you can shoot with a faster shutter speed, so you don’t get blurry photos, or when you’re shooting in low light, since more light can get through, which means you’re not forced to choose between shooting dark, blurry things or excessively grainy photos as you crank up the ISO (light sensitivity) to compensate for the lack of light. So, when someone’s talking about a “fast” lens, they’re talking about one with a big aperture, like F/1.8—easy to remember, you can shoot with faster shutter speeds with less light.
With a big aperture, you also have a shallower depth of field—subjects in focus are sharp, but everything around it is soft and blurry. A tighter aperture (higher F-stop number) lets you focus more at once, as you can see in the diagram above combined from Wikipedia. There’s more on depth of field here. Overall, we’re staying on the easy-to-swallow side, but if you’ve really got a hankering for F-stop knowledge, here’s a crazy detailed explanation.
Lens Types Having fun yet? There are a few basic types of lenses, and of course, a whole bunch of specialized ones beyond that, like macro or tilt lenses. But here are the basics.
A normal lens is one with a perspective that looks a lot the perspective of the human eye. With a 35mm or full-frame camera, that’s about a 50mm lens, though it varies depending on the size of the film or image sensor. For instance, this 35mm Nikon lens is for their DX cameras, DX meaning it has a sensor that’s not “full” (equal to 35mm film). When that lens is attached to a DX camera, it’s the equivalent to a 50mm lens on a full-frame camera—making it normal.
A wide-angle lens is, most basically, one with a focal length that’s way shorter than a normal lens (which, again, varies depending on the size of the film or sensor). Wide angles are useful for take wide shots—-panoramas, or just trying to squeeze a huge group of people in a single picture without being 10 light years away. You can also do neato distortion tricks—a fisheye is just a crazy kind of wide-angle lens. Example Image: Ekilby/Flickr
A telephoto lens is one with a really long focal length (like 400mm). Since they’re designed like telescopes, they are physically more compact than their focal lengths, but they can still get pretty damn massive. They’re good for shooting stuff far, far away. Example Image Shiny Things/Flickr
A prime lens is just one with a fixed focal length—you can’t zoom in or out—and typically they produce sharper pictures than all-but-the-priciest zoom lenses. Any of the above lens types can be prime lenses, or zoom, below. This fisheye is a prime lens.
A zoom lens is one you can adjust the focal length on—zoom in and out—so you can shoot a variety of stuff with a single lens. The aperture tends to vary based on the focal length, unless you get a really pricey zoom lens that’s also “fast.”
Lens Brands and Compatibility But, even looking at one company at a time, lenses are complicated and sticky. Take Canon, for instance. They’ve got a million different kinds of lens mounts (where the camera and lens fit together) for their single-lens reflex cameras, depending on how far back in time you go. Currently they’ve got two major kinds of lens mounts: EF (electro-focus because the focusing motor action is built into the lens) and and EF-S. The latter is for their entry-level to mid-range DSLRs only, because it’s made for their smaller (not full-frame, i.e., not 35mm equivalent) image sensors. Standard EF lenses will work on cameras with an EF-S mount, but EF-S lenses won’t work on cameras with a regular EF mount. And before that, there was the FD mount, which totally doesn’t work on DSLRs without an adapter.
Nikon isn’t quite as bad as here—they’ve had the same F-mount for over 40 years, so all their lenses with physically fit on the camera, but with their DSLRs, you’ve gotta watch out for their FX lenses (full-frame lenses like for the D700) vs. their DX lenses (like Canon, meant for their cameras with smaller APS-C sensors). When used on full-frame cameras, DX lenses will block out the corners of the picture since they’re supposed to cover a smaller image area. But overall, with Nikon you have the advantage of being able to use older lenses in a way you can’t with Canon gear. Ken Rockwell has a comprehensive tome about Nikon lenses and types for more.
The High Cost of Optics Okay, great. Here’s a real question: Why are lenses so goddamned expensive? Well, as Steve Heiner, Nikon SLR-division technical marketing manager, told us, “You’re paying for materials and the process of creating the lens,” which, as you might guess, improves image quality. Faster apertures—which require larger glass elements in pro zoom lenses—heavier materials like metal, for durability, and touches like a nano-crystal coating that minimizes reflections for low-light shooting are things that make lenses cost hundreds or thousands or dollars. As a rep from Canon told us, there’s no real getting cheaper over time, like most other mechanical components. Precision optical glass just doesn’t work that way.
Materials are also what separate crummy lenses from good ones, which is why cheap lenses in cellphones suck—they’ve gotta be cheap, really tiny and really light and well, you can’t change physics—and why even cheap DSLR lenses aren’t as good as expensive-as-hell ones. Update: Daniel pointed out this pretty excellent video showing how lenses are made, which shines more light on why they’re so damn pricey:
At the same time, there is a lot of progress in lens tech happening—look at all the ultra wide-angle lenses popping up in point-and-shoots now. Canon says that’s cause you’ve got smaller image sensors (which as we noted above, changes the relation of the focal length), more aspherical lens elements (which are cheaper to make), a new kind of ultra high refractive index aspherical optical glass (uhhhh, don’t ask me) and the miniaturization of mechanical parts like AF motors.
There’s a lot we had to leave out, like chromatic aberration and lens flare, but we hope we gave you a pretty good starting point to learn about lenses. Real camera pros, feel free to leave more in the comments.
Still something you still wanna know? Send any questions about lenses, upskirts, or crazy weird Japanese photographers who swarm cosplayers to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line. Also, thanks to Nikon for the lens diagrams!
Canon is making a new, ruggedized camera, the D10. How do we know how tough it is? Because it has a camouflage color scheme, the universal symbol of manliness.
Weird, bulbous, cartoonish design aside, the D10 looks like a great outdoor camera. The D10 can be frozen, dropped and drowned and it’ll still grab pictures with a perfectly sufficient 12.1 megapixels and a 4x, stabilized optical zoom.
The limits: 33 feet under water, a four foot drop onto hard ground, and a temperature range of 14-104°F. And if you hate the camo-look, you can swap out the faceplates with bright, garish, easy-to-find-in-the-snow colors. At $330, it isn’t cheap, but then, you probably won’t have to buy another camera for a long time.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
When most of us 
Lenses are actually a really complicated thing to talk about—if your job was to steer photons through tunnels of stretched glass, people would call you complicated too—so we’re gonna try to keep it to field basics, you should know to get around, rather than dive into the crazy physics and mathematical ratios and stuff.
With a big aperture, you also have a shallower depth of field—subjects in focus are sharp, but everything around it is soft and blurry. A tighter aperture (higher F-stop number) lets you focus more at once, as you can see in the diagram above 
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Okay, great. Here’s a real question: Why are lenses so goddamned expensive? Well, as Steve Heiner, Nikon SLR-division technical marketing manager, told us, “You’re paying for materials and the process of creating the lens,” which, as you might guess, improves image quality. Faster apertures—which require larger glass elements in pro zoom lenses—heavier materials like metal, for durability, and touches like a nano-crystal coating that minimizes reflections for low-light shooting are things that make lenses cost hundreds or thousands or dollars. As a rep from Canon told us, there’s no real getting cheaper over time, like most other mechanical components. Precision optical glass just doesn’t work that way.
