Hubertus Bigend

I stopped considering Flickr as a serious option to present my work years ago after it was acquired by Yahoo and users' pictures all of a sudden showed up in Yahoo ads without the users' consent. Many people left then. I stayed, but let my Pro account expire and practically stopped using Flickr.

Changes are always incentive to rethink one's options. But this change will probably make me delete my account completely.

I don't want ads around my pictures, and 50 dollars just to prevent them is too much. Especially if I have such little options to control how my images are presented and Flickr can force any new layout idea they want upon me. I don't like that.

On the other hand, if Flickr was more trustworthy and would give me more presentation options, I might even have considered a 2 TB account for an online archive of my stuff.

How come, for APS-C, at 70mm sharpness *decreases* from f/2.8 to f/4? From there to f/5.6 it increases again, as would be expected.

@Poweruser: In principle your objection is valid, but for video, which is what the original comment was about, you really can crop quite heavily from a sensor's megapixel count until the resulting resolution drops below the actual video resolution, even for Full HD, which is still only 2 MP.

Focal length of this lens is 1260 mm, not 2520.

When the day comes for my Four Thirds DSLR gear to become replaced, I'll be open to all offerings.

If mirrorless systems will evolve significantly until then, I might go mirrorless. As the state of mirrorless is now, I wouldn't, though, so another DSLR system would be the probable choice.

Back in 2005, I did choose Four Thirds for a reason: high-quality telephotography with portable gear of limited size and weight. And while Four Thirds failed to deliver on many promises, that was one it didn't and still doesn't.

For the same reason, while an APS-C DSLR would be an alternative, a full frame DSLR rather would not.

So if Canon doesn't want to sell me a decent (meaning: at least semi-pro) APS-C DSLR, then fine, it'll be Nikon, Sony or Pentax then. It's as easy as that.

@bimmerman: I haven't really tested that, but I'd think it would be still somewhat slower than the 20/1.7, even though it was officially cd-af compatible right from the start.

@Iskender: Right, the lens is about the same size and weight as the Olympus 12-60. The only other really good superzoom I know of is the big Canon 28-300 L for full frame.

f/6.7 for a 300mm telezoom is ridiculous indeed.

f/5.6 or f/5.8 for a compact 14-150 superzoom is okay, though. Even though I do have some fast HG lenses for my FT DSLR, I love my Panasonic "Leica" 14-150/3.5-5.6. At 150mm it has a nice bokeh, too, even though it's "only" f/5.6. If the Tamron was any good, it would probably be the first lens I'd buy if I ever was going to buy a Micro FT camera.

If the Tamron is good, that would be one obstacle less for me if I should want to buy into Micro FT some day.

On the other hand, what I'm using now is the Panasonic "Leica" 14-150 FT lens, and neither of the two existing MFT superzooms seems to be a match for it. So the Tamron would have to be better than both...

@Admin: Text says 30/1.4 comes for Nikon, Canon, Sigma; table says Four Thirds, Pentax, Sony, too, which is probably in error? (While I would be glad to hear otherwise, I think Sigma has completely stopped making Four Thirds lenses?)

Anyway, it's good to see Sigma come up with more and more quality stuff, and for the mirrorless systems, too. I don't care for their new metal casing, though. I found the plastic versions already to be nice and solid.

And I'm somewhat surprised at their introducing a 60/2.8 non-macro lens, after their latest DP camera came with a 50/2.8 macro which I would have expected to be offered seperately just like the 19mm and 30mm lenses used to be DP lenses in the first place...

Besides what Richard says, Olympus was well advised to stop buying sensors from Kodak after their attempt to provide a live view capable sensor resulted in the worst sensor of all FT cameras, the 10 MP interline CCD of the E-400. While it did deliver excellent low ISO JPEGs out-of-cam, high ISO was catastrophic and it turned out not to be up to the task of delivering decent live view. At least that's what I gather from findings on the Net.

If they'd given it a finder, and a hotshoe, they could have made me interested.

This is a weird discussion. If you don't want downloads from a public forum, don't upload to the forum. It's that simple. It wouldn't harm dpreview to rethink the wording of both "download" and "original", but there's absolutely no reason to change anything else.

Nice! But some criticism, too:

No problem with a "DOWNLOAD" button – it being 2013 and the WWW having come of age a long time ago, someone who uploads something in a forum can be expected to know that there is some danger of it being downloaded by others...

But "DOWNLOAD ORIGINAL" is misleading, especially to casual users who don't upload stuff themselves, because it suggests there really was a full-size, possibly unchanged out-of-camera JPEG to be downloaded, which it only is if the uploader really chose so.

Which is even more problematic as I don't see any information about the actual size of that "original". There should be a display somewhere showing the pixel dimensions of what is there.

In my judgement, the achievment of the mirrorless camera is nothing special, and the progress mirrorless systems made is nothing special either. After all, a mirrorless camera is nothing but a DSLR with the mirror left out and the OVF replaced by an EVF. All the technology needed was already there for quite some time when the first manufaturer decided to put everything together in a way that would form a mirrorless system camera.

And most manufacturers made design mistakes which unnecessarily reduce their mirrorless cameras' attractivity when compared to the DSLR. I agree, though, that the OM-D is indeed the most complete mirrorless camera today, and I probably would have already bought one if it wasn't for their limited assortment of lenses even when compared to their own Four Thirds range.

Is it just me, or is my impression correct that since Amazon's acqusition of dpreview even the most popular cameras take longer and longer to get reviewed and more and more reviews only come in trickles? If I still was the "early adopter" of camera tech I kind of used to be for some time, dpreview could not exert much influence on my decisions anymore these days.

I wonder why nobody seems to feel that the lack of a viewfinder is something to not like. Especially with travel zooms reaching up to 480 mm (eq.) or more, I cannot believe even half-serious telephoto shooting is possible at all; without a finder it is already improbable to even, well, /find/ a subject like, say, a bird in a tree.

If miniaturization will produce a travel zoom including a viewfinder at some point in time, that will probably be the first time I'll see myself inclined to perhaps replace my old Olympus C-70Z...

The difference is, from Leica, that "special edition" at least is a Leica, a substantial piece of equipment they created themselves, not an existing comsumer product bought from Sony and sold for five times its original price.

What did they forget regarding birders? What exactly is the 7D lacking? I'm asking because at this point in time, while still using Four Thirds gear but more and more often wondering what else I could use, I find the 7D and 60D perhaps the two most attractive bodies for my (amateurish) bird photography ambitions. (Other favourites at this time being the Sony A77, A65 and A57.)

I think the crops are not really sharp – my guess is that the air was not calm enough to get proper long-distance sharpness (possibly would have made supertele shooting quite impossible that day). I think the originals on your Flickr page show closer buildings which correspond better to your praise of the lens, though!

Anyway, thanks for showing us. Although it remains one of the least exciting lenses of late, it actually might make sense as a cheap but good standard prime for both NEX and Micro-FT, after all. Of course it would've been nicer if it was f/2.4 or f/2, or if it had at least some macro capabilities...

digitalkamera.de, as far as I can tell, seem to only judge by out-of-cam JPEG, which clearly has a very steep tone curve applied, rendering shadows even darker, which may account for them to assume a 2/3 EV ISO difference.