On Sep 25, 2013, at 3:42 PM, Zos Xavius <[email protected]> wrote: > I prefer vintage glass actually for rendering qualities. ...
Similar feelings here, for some lenses in particular. Actually, moving away from SLR lenses, I find more of the image qualities I like in RF lenses overall, at least for the shorter focal lengths. That's one of the reasons I moved to TTL mirrorless and Leica RF ... access to lenses that work better to my eye. I'm truly delighted by the old Zeiss uncoated lenses I've acquired with the Robot cameras, and the new-yet-old Voigtländer designs epitomized by the Color Skopar 21, 28, 35 and 50 mm. I was just testing the Color Skopar 28mm f/3.5 with the E-PL1 ... it is such a fine lens. :-) I don't read shootouts and comparisons very often, and rarely take them seriously. They generally don't tell me much. Working with a given lens tells me what I want to know. >> FourThirds SLR lenses... > > Are they really still in production? The last new 4/3 lens was 2008. 5 > years ago. I'd be surprised if they were still manufacturing them. I'd > imagine all "new" stock is just old stock. Of course, I can't say for sure. But the indications are that they are in production and sell in modest but regular quantities. Four-thirds.org keeps comprehensive lens listings for FourThirds and Micro-FourThirds, and marks them when they are discontinued ... http://four-thirds.org/en/fourthirds/lens_chart.html is for FourThirds SLR. They seem well connected to the manufacturers. Just because new models have not been delivered since 2008 (and I'm not so sure of that date, to be honest, I think it was more like 2010) doesn't mean that they have sold no new lenses. Remember that the E-5 was new in Fall 2010, and they didn't discontinue the E-XX and E-XXX bodies until sometime in the first quarter of 2011. There are still likely some NOS of the lower end bodies to be sold, and the E-5 was only very recently marked as no longer available at B&H Photo. There is a substantial community of professional photographers still who use Olympus equipment and buy gear on a regular basis, it's not all just consumer sales. A downer: what few of the lovely Panasonic/Leica lenses (Vario-Elmarit-D 14-50/2.8-3.5 ASPH OIS, Vario-Elmarit-D 14-150/3.5-5.6 ASPH OIS, and Summilux-D 25/1.4 ASPH) that sell today are almost certainly being sourced from what are now diminishing existing stocks (they were never very abundantly available to begin with), and Sigma has discontinued all of their FourThirds SLR lenses. (Not that I have much love for Sigma lenses anyway... ;-) But the upside is that the Micro-FourThirds world is jumping with great new lenses every year. There are about 30 mFT lenses available, more coming from three or four vendors. The new E-M1 promises to be a very very good body, and completes the fusion of the two mounts with the right features to support both. So at this point, if FourThirds mount is gone, its fully compatible descendant is going to carry the banner for the format AND the lenses for the foreseeable future, and it doesn't really matter if the SLR lenses are obsoleted and pass out of production forever. The good news is that those who own them ... myself included ... are not orphaned as the derivative mount and OEM adapter works just as well, if not better, than the original did with the same lenses. And that alone is pretty amazing stuff! G -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
