There is a new Kickstarter project for a “convertible” lens system:

The Neptune Convertible Art Lens System consists of a lens base that’s mounted to your camera and several convertible lens components. By interchanging the front components, you can shoot photos or videos at three different fixed focal lengths — 35mm, 50mm and 80mm. An Art Lens System unlike any other; it offers you all the freedom of a zoom lens without compromising on prime lens quality, and it’s the only convertible Art Lens out there to work with a range of modern-day analogue and digital cameras. Each component is assembled by using the finest multi-coated glass and crafted to produce exceptionally sharp focus and strong, saturated colors for stunning high-definition images — even when you’re shooting close-ups at 0.25m/9.8” with Thalassa (35mm), 0.4/15.7” with Despina (50mm) or 0.8m/31.5” with Proteus (80mm). This is an Art Lens System that lets you take beautifully intimate shots, allowing you to get near enough to capture every last detail of your subject. And because it’s so small and lightweight design, you can take it with you everywhere.

The Neptune Convertible Art Lens System: Aperture Comparison from Lomography on Vimeo.

Cool!

There is the Megapixel race, the High ISO race and in those days the talk is all about frames per second race. The Sony A9 killed the headlines with the amazing 20fps shooting without blackout.

But just for fun…did you ever wonder what’s the fastest camera on earth? Well here it is:

A research group at Lund University in Sweden has developed a camera that can film at a rate equivalent to five trillion images per second, or events as short as 0.2 trillionths of a second. This is faster than has previously been possible.

Yi Halo 360 camera

This year NAB show made the impossible possible. It was even more boring the last years show :)

Anyway, let’s have a look of some minor (and still interesting) stuff:

YI 4K+ 4K 60fps camera (Personal View)
Power Vision Submarine and Egg Drones, NAB 2017 (Personal View).
SLR Magic Anamorphic Lens Rig, NAB 2017 (Personal View).
Lanparte Gimbal for 360 cameras, NAB 2017 (Personal View).
Nick Driftwood’s 12k 360 Rig using 6x Lumix GX80 cameras (Photogearnews)
Lanparte monitor QR and arm Personal View
NAB 2017 Highlights (ALC).

Canon revised their forecats and there is good and bad news:

1. in Q1 profit was higher than expected (270 billion Yen instead of 255 billion Yen)
2. But the company’s outlook on 2017 camera unit sales are gloomier, with ILC unit sales dropping 7% and compacts down 13%, working out to -9% overall.

About time for Canon to think how cool it would be if they would make a FF mirrorless system camera like the one designed by David Riesenberg? :)

via Dpreview.

CIPA (PDF file here) published the full March camera shipment report. And the good news continues as it seems that in 2017 camera sales will not fall below the 2016 year. If the trend continues 2017 will be the first year after 2011 (if I remember it right) without a market drop.

What a surprise! The Chinese manufacturer Zhongy (also known as Mitakon) did announce the development of two new G-mount manual focusing lenses:

Speedmaster 65mm F1.4 (GFX equivalent of 50mm f/1.1) with 77mm filter diameter
Speedmaster 85mm F1.2 (GFX equivalent of 67mm f/1.0) with 82mm filter diameter. 1050g weights and 120mm length

Both lenses will ship by end of this year for an undisclosed price. While those are manual focusing lenses only it’s certainly great news to see fast primes coming for the GFX! It has been one of the weak points of the system so far as even the newly announced 110mm f/2.0 only goes down to f/1.6 in FF equivalent terms. But how is the image quality? Well check the images below. Both were exhibited in China’s camera show “2017 CHINA P & E”:

There wasn’t much to report this year from the NAB show:

1) Sony announced a new E-mount UMC-S3CA camera with Genlock support (SonyAlphaRumors)
2) Samyang announced a new 16mm Cine lens (Samyang)
3) Panasonic teased a new Cinema Camcorder with EF mount and released the new 1.1 GH5 firmwware update (43rumors).

That’s it!