NEX 9

Am I the first to pose the question I wonder what the the NEX 9 will be like?.......................only kidding ;-)

Be sure to be online at this forum to follow the announcement and plan to release more trolls I mean NEX-9 by Fall 2012.

BRIAN PARSONS said:

Am I the first to pose the question I wonder what the the NEX 9 will be like?.......................only kidding ;-)

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That will be difficult. The E-mount was specially designed for the smaller APS-C sensors. E-mount lenses are not designed to cover the area of a full frame sensor. In order for Sony to make an NEX-9 they will have to make it with A-mount. Not a bad idea any way (making a body for A-mount lenses only). Although not probably a good marketing decision. Sony want people to buy their new E-mount lenses. Not to be able to use their old A-mount lenses.

El Profe said:

That will be difficult. The E-mount was specially designed for the smaller APS-C sensors. E-mount lenses are not designed to cover the area of a full frame sensor. In order for Sony to make an NEX-9 they will have to make it with A-mount. Not a bad idea any way (making a body for A-mount lenses only).

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But then it would not be an NEX. It would be an Alpha.

El Profe said:

Although not probably a good marketing decision. Sony want people to buy their new E-mount lenses. Not to be able to use their old A-mount lenses.

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Really? Hmmmm... then why did they release the LA-EA2?

--

The greatest of mankind's criminals are those who delude themselves into thinking they have done 'the right thing.'

• Rayna Butler

Certainly, the lenses are not designed for 'full frame', but I thought that the mount was designed so that 'full frame' was an option. This is my impression based on other discussions, but not based on information from Sony.

I agree. Sony should be able to do what Nikon has done, if they want: build a full frame sensor camera that will sense when an APS-C lens is attached, and use only the APS-C portion of the sensor with that lens (at a reduced resolution, of course).

--

Nex-5 with kit lenses, Contax G 35, and a number of legacy lenses (mostly Canon FD)

My bet would be NEX9 will be worst than NEX7 so as to make room for NEX10.
That's how they play their game.

I think the A850/A900 already does that, only you see the whole image in the VF, but the camera captures a cropped image.

The Nikon has a mask that appears in the VF, when using an APS-C lens. Sony doesn't use a mask, but there are indicators in the VF showing the edge of the image.

SQLGuy said:

I agree. Sony should be able to do what Nikon has done, if they want: build a full frame sensor camera that will sense when an APS-C lens is attached, and use only the APS-C portion of the sensor with that lens (at a reduced resolution, of course).

--

Nex-5 with kit lenses, Contax G 35, and a number of legacy lenses (mostly Canon FD)

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the E-mount lenses are designed with the reduced distance from the back of the lens to the sensor, created by the removal of the mirror. So, any FF NEX, would be quite thick, which defeats the purpose of the NEX cameras.

El Profe said:

That will be difficult. The E-mount was specially designed for the smaller APS-C sensors. E-mount lenses are not designed to cover the area of a full frame sensor. In order for Sony to make an NEX-9 they will have to make it with A-mount. Not a bad idea any way (making a body for A-mount lenses only). Although not probably a good marketing decision. Sony want people to buy their new E-mount lenses. Not to be able to use their old A-mount lenses.

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There's something critical in your post that ignores the Law of physics...

A-mount means, registration distance = 44.5mm (I can't remember well) So....what are you supposed to do with that empty space??? This has been discussed as hell of the impossible Idea of a NEX-type body camera with A-mount when some rumors appeared about a supposedly A-mount NEX-type body camera..

It's all about philosophy behind creating a new mount (Smaller mount, smaller diameter lenses, smaller body, etc etc etc... so that you can't mount Alpha lenses on a NEX camera for OBVIOUS reasons unless you provide the adequate spacing between sensor and lens...).

Btw, It has nothing to do with marketing as you're stating...If it was about selling just E-mount lenses, then why Sony released an adapter with screw-drive to be able to AF on OLD A-MOUNT lenses???

El Profe said:

That will be difficult. The E-mount was specially designed for the smaller APS-C sensors. E-mount lenses are not designed to cover the area of a full frame sensor. In order for Sony to make an NEX-9 they will have to make it with A-mount. Not a bad idea any way (making a body for A-mount lenses only). Although not probably a good marketing decision. Sony want people to buy their new E-mount lenses. Not to be able to use their old A-mount lenses.

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--
Proud Sony NEX 5 user =D

Some possible improvements:

GPS
In-camera image stabilisation
An improved (lower noise) 24 Mpix sensor.

How about four primary colours? Instead of two green pixels in each group, make one of them orange to match the extra ink in the better Epson printers. This would give a larger gamut and better skin tones. Disadvantage - larger files (more information).

Make available an official Sony bellows, with movements, and copy stand.

Regarding... If it was about selling just E-mount lenses, then why Sony released an adapter with screw-drive to be able to AF on OLD A-MOUNT lenses???

Sony original idea when NEX series were released was for people to buy E-series lenses specifically designed for a mirror less APS-C sensor camera. Since originally they only had 2 lenses they decide to make and sell the LA-EA1 lens adapter for A-mount lenses. Not because they want people to actually use A-mount lenses instead of buying E-mount lenses, but because it was and still is a good temporary solution until they can make more E-mount lenses. When they saw the complaints of the people that A-mount lenses did not auto focus unless the lenses have internal motors and that the auto focus performance was so slow that was practically useless they decided to make the LA-EA2 with internal motor and a translucent mirror inside. That way screw drive lenses can also can plus thanks to the translucent mirror inside the camera can auto focus using the faster phase detection system instead of the slower contrast detection system. Again this is done to increase the acceptance and sales of the NEX series of cameras until more E-mount lenses are made.

By the way... 3 more E-mount lenses in the way in '2012. A high performance G standard zoom lens, a wide angle zoom lens, and a mid telephoto prime lens.

If you take a look at the E-mount flange focal distance and diameter, it is fairly easy to design even fast lenses for a full-frame sensor without vignetting problems.

In fact, as a very imprecise and overly harsh test, I tried looking at the image size projected on a sheet of paper from my Minolta 50mm f/1.7 RS at infinity focus on the original Sony NEX adapter. It looks like it would not be clipping a full-frame sensor. Perhaps some A-mount lenses would vignette, but certainly there have been full-frame SLRs and rangefinders with smaller flange diameters: M42, Nikon, Leica, etc. Minolta's old lens line for Leica might be good starting point for which Sony has IP.

It is true that current NEX lenses are all targeting APS-C, but how many lenses are we talking about anyway? There's plenty of room for a full-frame E-mount line, but right now there are many more reasons to work toward making physically smaller lenses to cover APS-C sensors.

Also, full-frame sensors are much harder to produce than APS-C and would make the NEX at least a little larger, so I wouldn't be surprised if Sony's just waiting for when (if) the market and production cost make full-frame E-mount commercially viable. A full-frame NEX would be fantastic for old lenses, but Sony wouldn't be making any profit on lenses sales then, would they?

Keep in mind that APS-C sensors are huge compared to Pentax Q, which is the direction folks wanting tiny lenses are really pushing the market....

RGB+Orange would be a really bad choice. You need to get luminance right, which means Green is most important, so you want more pixels sensitive to it. That's why two Green for each Red or Blue in standard Bayer filters. Other choices used before:

1. CMYG. In the old Canon G1 and various others. This has the advantage that 3/4 of the pixels sense Green (C, Y, and G). It also lets more light pass, increasing effective ISO. Dumb processing could use C-G=B, Y-G=R, and then subtract either derived B or R from M to get the other color... which gives poorer color accuracy. With more complex colorspace processing, I think CMYG can be better than standard Bayer.

2. RGBE. The Sony F828 used "Emerald" -- a greenish Cyan -- as the fourth color. It worked ok, but wasn't a huge win.

3. RGB+Clear. Kodak patents teach this. The clear ups sensitivity, but there's a catch. Amplification on pixels is usually the same no matter which filter is in front of it, so the clear pixels saturate much faster and might not contribute to the image data.

In research, even per-pixel random colors have been tried, and there are good and bad aspects to any choice.

The really dumb thing is that JPEGs don't record in RGB space and are "perceptually compressed," so a lot of the color information the sensor captured is unrecoverable. Raw data has much greater potential to get the colors right and extend the gamut.

Look at a Leica M9... Not that thick, the main result would be getting the mirror out of the way.

If the 7 appears to work out quite well as I think it will do, I will have a hard time deciding when time comes to think about replacement of my A900, if there is also a NEX FF by then; doesn´t need to go to 48Mpix for me, 32 will do quite nicely (JMO!).

IMO, the A-mount adapters were just meant to please both A-mount users getting a NEX as companion, and an alternative to potential new users not finding the lenses they would like to use. By their own confirmation, they didn´t expect the appeal of the NEX for a bunch of other (legacy) lenses... Seeing its success, they now scramble to fill the gap in too limited a line. Makes perfectly sense if you ask me.

ProfHankD said:

RGB+Orange would be a really bad choice. You need to get luminance right, which means Green is most important, so you want more pixels sensitive to it.

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Orange will do just as well as green for luminance. Anywhere near the middle of the spectrum is fine. The point is to match up with the latest printers.

ProfHankD said:

That's why two Green for each Red or Blue in standard Bayer filters.

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The reason for using two greens is that it didn't occur to Bayer to use more than three primaries. But if you want accurate colour with the minimum of metamerism, the more bands of the spectrum you measure the better. Major art galleries make multi-band photos of paintings because RGB is not accurate enough.

ProfHankD said:

Other choices used before:

1. CMYG. In the old Canon G1 and various others. This has the advantage that 3/4 of the pixels sense Green (C, Y, and G). It also lets more light pass, increasing effective ISO. Dumb processing could use C-G=B, Y-G=R, and then subtract either derived B or R from M to get the other color... which gives poorer color accuracy. With more complex colorspace processing, I think CMYG can be better than standard Bayer.

2. RGBE. The Sony F828 used "Emerald" -- a greenish Cyan -- as the fourth color. It worked ok, but wasn't a huge win.

Click to expand...

Cyan would be OK as a fifth primary.

ProfHankD said:

3. RGB+Clear. Kodak patents teach this. The clear ups sensitivity, but there's a catch. Amplification on pixels is usually the same no matter which filter is in front of it, so the clear pixels saturate much faster and might not contribute to the image data.

In research, even per-pixel random colors have been tried, and there are good and bad aspects to any choice.

The really dumb thing is that JPEGs don't record in RGB space and are "perceptually compressed," so a lot of the color information the sensor captured is unrecoverable. Raw data has much greater potential to get the colors right and extend the gamut.

Click to expand...

The JPG format was OK in its day but is really due for replacement. Nowadays we have plenty of bandwidth and disk space and could use only lossless compression.

APS-C is improving faster than FF and it is the FF for video. I predict Medium Format becoming really niche, Full Frame becoming the next Medium Format, and APS becoming the Next Full Frame. (Maybe we'll eventually get to the point of digital bokeh).

So with that said, I don't think we'll ever see NEX series as a FF camera.

--
Rishio
http://www.rishio.com

El Profe said:

Regarding... If it was about selling just E-mount lenses, then why Sony released an adapter with screw-drive to be able to AF on OLD A-MOUNT lenses???

Sony original idea when NEX series were released was for people to buy E-series lenses specifically designed for a mirror less APS-C sensor camera. Since originally they only had 2 lenses they decide to make and sell the LA-EA1 lens adapter for A-mount lenses. Not because they want people to actually use A-mount lenses instead of buying E-mount lenses, but because it was and still is a good temporary solution until they can make more E-mount lenses. When they saw the complaints of the people that A-mount lenses did not auto focus unless the lenses have internal motors and that the auto focus performance was so slow that was practically useless they decided to make the LA-EA2 with internal motor and a translucent mirror inside. That way screw drive lenses can also can plus thanks to the translucent mirror inside the camera can auto focus using the faster phase detection system instead of the slower contrast detection system. Again this is done to increase the acceptance and sales of the NEX series of cameras until more E-mount lenses are made.

By the way... 3 more E-mount lenses in the way in '2012. A high performance G standard zoom lens, a wide angle zoom lens, and a mid telephoto prime lens.

Click to expand...

Yeah, that's one of the reason they released LA-EA1 back then..Lack of available E-mount lenses...

But you said

El Profe said:

[...] Although not probably a good marketing decision. Sony want people to buy their new E-mount lenses. Not to be able to use their old A-mount lenses.

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So, definitely they want people to be able to use A-mount lenses with the new LA-EA2 and even get some of those old design lenses. But after all...the LA-EA2 was designed for camera man using NEX-VG10 or VG20 where the bulk is not a limiting deciding factor at the moment of buying such an adapter. (I wll get it anyways for my NEX-5).
--
Proud Sony NEX 5 user =D

The NEX 7 isn't even out yet and yur talking about the NEX 9 ????? OK, I'll do you one better, I wonder what the NEX 11 will be like ???