Before announcing the next PhotoRumors giveaway, a quick update on the Olympus saga:
“An investigative panel has found Japan’s disgraced Olympus Corp hid up to $1.67 billion in losses from its investors, but is likely to say there is no evidence of involvement by organized crime in the cover-up, a source said Monday.”
Via Reuters
According to Christian Sorega, who initially broke the news about the New Ricoh 16MP 24-85mm GXR unit, the aperture of the new lens will be f/3.5-5.5:
“As you can see in the above image it will feature a Sony 16 MP sensor and have a 24-85mm zoom with a f3.5-5.5 aperture and the lens will not be GR labelled. Further it should be relatively big as it will not collapse like the Olympus m4/3 kit zooms for example.”
Samsung NX20 is listed again on the company’s Global Download Centre. The new camera will be announced during the PMA in January 2012.
I expect the Samsung NX1 to be announced later in 2012.
Sigma announced a new 17-50mm f/2.8 EX DC HSM lens for Sony and Pentax DSLR cameras. The old 17-50mm f/2.8 EX DC OS HSM lens ($669) will be discontinued.
Specification (for Sony mount):
After the Pentax K-r body was listed as discontinued at B&H, today Pentax Japan officially confirmed on Twitter that orders for the K-r will not be accepted after December 9, 2011. It will be interesting to see if Pentax (now owned by Ricoh) will release a replacement during the PMA show in early January 2012.
Currently all Pentax K-r versions are listed as discontinued at B&H except the K-r + 18-55mm lens kit:
Patent 2011242520 from Olympus describes several different wide angle lenses: 8mm f/3.5 fisheye, 12mm f/1.8, 12mm f/2.8, 10mm f/2.8 and 12mm f/2.0:
Here are the top 10 most visited PhotoRumors posts for November 2011 (7 of them are Fuji related):
Today Reuters and AP reported that Olympus may have to sell off its camera division in order to survive as a company (Olympus consists of several different divisions). This should not be a surprise since the company’s stock got hammered in the past few weeks as a result of a fraud scandal. The more interesting question is who will buy Olympus camera division and what would they do with it in the future?
Similar to the Leica i9 concept and the WVIL hoax, this Apple iCam concept created by Antonio DeRosa uses the iPhone as the core for a mirrorless camera system:
We have not heard any updates on the rumored digital rangefinder from Zeiss in a while. Recently Zeissrumors published this email where a company representative clearly states that there are no plans for a new camera in the near future:
“Thank you for your inquiry to Carl Zeiss.
As a specialist for high performance lenses, we will continue to concentrate to develop, manufacture and distribute high-end lenses as perfect tools for many cameras in still photography and professional cinematography, like we do now for more than 120 years.
We never built any camera body, and we do not plan to do this within the next future.
But we plan to expand our current portfolio of lenses for further cameras systems in future.”
