News
Sigma has widened its new Cine lens range with the Cine FF High Speed 14mm and 135mm T2 full-frame lenses. Sigma now offers seven cine prime lenses, from 14mm to 135mm, and three zooms: the 18-35, 24-35 and 50-100 T2.
The lenses are suitable for up to 8K resolution and most are available in Canon EF, Sony E mount and PL mounts. Sigma will change mounts if you change cameras.
The lenses have a focus ring with feet and metre markings - you decide which you want when you buy - which are luminous to make settings easier to see in the dark.
There are no details of price or availability yet.
Zeiss has revealed the next-generation of its popular CP.2 Compact Prime lenses – the Zeiss CP.3 and CP.3 XD range.
The lenses are smaller and more compact than the CP.2s and come in focal lengths from 15mm to 135mm. T-stops are T2.9 from 15 to 21mm and T2.1 from 25 to 135mm. All focal lengths now also cover full frame sensors where the 8mm CP.2 doesn’t.
The sizes of the new optics lenses are more consistent to make swapping between them on rigs easier.
All the CP.3s have a 95mm front diameter where the CP.2s were 114mm. There are 14-blade apertures for smooth out-of-focus areas and the focus rings all have 300° of focus rotation.
The XD line provides metadata to enable automatic correction of distortion and vignetting in post production, and are ideal for films using special effects. The full press release says:
Canon has revealed a new Compact-Servo 70-200mm Telephoto Zoom Lens. It's the second in the new range of Canon cine lenses, to go alongside the similarly sized and specced 18-80mm lens. It's for Super35-sized sensors and will be priced at £6,099, not including the servo grip, in the UK later this year. Canon's information says:
Samyang has unveiled a new VDSLR 16mm T2.6 cine lens. This means Samyang now makes 19 cine-style lenses. Thirteen are for DSLRs and six for mirrorless system cameras.
The new 16mm T2.6 will be available in June at a price of £529. The official info says:
Sony has revealed its most expensive but feature-packed mirrorless camera ever, the all-new full-frame A9. Costing roughly £4500 when it hits the shelves in June, it's largely aimed at sports still photographers as the video spec seems little improved from the current A7S Mark II.
With a shutter speed of up to 1/32,000 sec, the camera uses a world first stacked 24.2MP CMOS sensor and solves the problem of viewfinder blackout for action shooters as now it doesn't black out when shooting continuously at up to 20fps.
The AF has had a much-needed boost, with a 693-point phase-detect system. The viewfinder blackout and poor AF has been the biggest issue with stills action shooters using the A7 series so far.
There is now double the battery life and twin card slots, too.
The video spec offers similar features as the current A7S Mark II with 4K (3840x2160p) video recording across the full width of the full-frame image sensor - although the sensor is new and higher resolution. When shooting in this format, the camera uses full pixel readout without pixel binning to collect 6K of information, oversampling it to produce high quality 4K footage. Recording is also available in the popular Super 35mm size.
The camera can record also Full HD at 120 fps at up to 100 Mbps, which allows footage to be reviewed and eventually edited into 4x or 5x slow motion video files in Full HD resolution with AF tracking which could be a game-changer for sports and action video shooters. Sony's official information says:
Manfrotto has revealed a brand new design of tripod head that not only looks very different, but uses new technology in different ways. The brand new Nitrotech head is suitable for lots of different types of cameras, easy to set up and use, offers easily adjustable control over camera motion and solves many of the headaches of using tripods for filmmaking. Such as finding and maintaining perfect counterbalance for the huge range and size of cameras.
Manfrotto’s N8 Nitrotech video head is the first model to be revealed in the range, and costs just £449.95. It’s on sale now.
It is also available in a range of kits with Manfrotto’s well-established tripods. With the 535 Single Leg tripod the whole kit is £1119.95, and 546GB Twin MS tripod it’s £959.95. Both are available now.
A Nitrotech N8 with 536 Single Leg tripod is £1279.95 while the 546GB Twin GS is £959.95 and both these will be available to buy in May/June. The official press release says:
Sony has revealed a new G-Master 100-400mm zoom, as an ideal complement to the new superfast sports camera A9 which was launched today. To answer the need for longer focal-length lenses for its new £4500 mirrorless camera, the new zoom will be available in June for approximately £2500. The variable maximum aperture of f/4.5-5.6 is slightly disappointing, but it means the price and weight can be kept down. Sony's official information says:
