Sony launched the long-awaited Sony Alpha NEX-3 and Sony Alpha NEX-5! They are interchangeable lens cameras with a 14.2 megapixel APS-C sized (23.4×15.6mm) CMOS sensor, capable of recording HD video. Both do not have mirrors, allowing for far more compact sizes! This is the NEX-5.

Left: NEX-5; right: NEX-3.

This is the cheaper, polycarbonate-bodied NEX-3 with the Sony E 16mm F2.8 pancake lens.

The magnesium alloy-bodied NEX-5 costs a bit more for a smaller figure.

Both NEX-3 and NEX-5 have an excellent TruBlack 3″ 640×480 LED-backlit screen which can swivel up and down!

This is the underside of the NEX-5, which is trimmed somewhat around the tripod mount!

They take a new NP-FW50 battery, and have a single card slot which fits both Memory Stick Duo (MSPD, Pro-HG Duo) and SD format (SD, SDHC, SDXC).

This is the Sony E 18-55mm F3.5-5.6 OSS (Optical Steady Shot) on the NEX-3.

Yes that’s right – stabilization is now on the lens for the E-mount. Also, the E-mount has a record-breaking flange distance of 18mm, beating Micro Four-Thirds’ 20mm. This means that the E-mount will be able to use more lenses with glassless adapters for maximum quality. The shorter the flange distance, the more you can adapt! You can see the list of mounts and their flange distances here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lens_mount

Sony also announced an E-mount camcorder! Also in the picture is an upcoming Sony E 18-200mm F3.5-6.3 OSS (with Active mode).

The NEX-3 and NEX-5 do not have a pop-up flash – instead they have a detachable flash which comes with in the box! This is the cute HVL-F7S. It mounts using a new proprietary connector and screw thread to tighten.

Closeups. This flash does a guide number of 7 meters at ISO100.

On the red NEX-3. Quite a striking color that one!

There is a LA-EA1 lens adapter, which lets you use A-mount lenses on the NEX cameras.

It has a detachable tripod mount. If I could get my hands on one, I could determine if the slot is big enough for a future 36x24mm full-frame NEX!

I also imagine that somebody would install a bevel gear to allow motorized autofocus (albeit controlled by something external to the camera.)

It lets you control aperture, but does not allow autofocus, not even with SSM/SAM lenses, sadly!

The VCL-ECU1 wide-angle converter (for 18mm on full-frame equivalent) and VCL-ECF1 fisheye converters mount onto the Sony E 16mm F2.8’s front bayonet mount.

Oh and there’s Sweep Panorama, which isn’t limited to the 16mm lens. I wonder how the wide-angle and fisheye converters will work with this!

The Sony Carl Zeiss 24-70mm F2.8 SSM mounted on the NEX-5 via LA-EA1 lens adapter.

This is the external ECM-SST1 stereo mike.

Sony also sells various other accessories, including this LCS-EMB1A/LCS-EMB2A leather case. There is also a lens-covering leather jacket in the LCS-EML1A and LCS-EML2A. Oh and the STP-XH1 strap.

There will be a presumably smaller version of the LCS-WR1AM – the LCS-WR2AM wrapping cloth, in black, brown, red and white!

There is a FDA-SV1 optical viewfinder which complements the 16mm nicely.
http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=10151&catalogId=10551&langId=-1&productId=8198552921666192668

So how does it compare to the Panasonic Lumix GF1? Obviously, much smaller!

Side view.

Just the pancake lenses.

There are complaints about the menu being slow and difficult to maneuver but I’ll wait until I can try one to make any statements.

However, the wonderful things are the ISO performance which goes from ISO200 to ISO12800. I’ll wait for DxO Labs to measure the real sensor sensitivity though.

Both the NEX-3 and NEX-5 offer 7 FPS in Speed Priority Continuous mode, and 2.7 FPS in Continuous Advance. The flash sync is 1/160th of a second, unfortunately due to a focal plane shutter.

There is DMF (Direct Manual Focus) which lets you manual focus after focus is confirmed. There is also Kelvin WB available with M9-G9 color correction!

Both have the following features we first saw in Sony Cybershots:

– Auto HDR 3 shots 1-6 EV, 1 EV every 6 stages
– Handheld Twilight
– Handheld Night Scene
– Sweep Panorama which can go up to 12416 x 1856 Horizontal (Wide) at 226 degrees, or 2160 x 5536 Vertical (Wide) at 151 degrees.
– Intelligent Auto-Focus prefocuses when you frame your subject (which already exists on Cybershots anyway!)
– Face-detect 8 faces
– Smile Shutter

Sony E Mount Lenses

Sony E 16mm F2.8 – 22.5mm thin, 49mm filter thread, 67 grams, 1:12.82x maximum magnification, 24cm MFD (not stellar, but still beating the Canon/Nikkor 24mm F1.4 by 1cm)
Sony E 18-55mm F3.5-5.6 OSS, 49mm filter thread, 194 grams, 1:3.33x maximum magnification, 24cm MFD (same as Sony 18-55mm F3.5-5.6 DT SAM)
Sony E 18-200mm F3.5-6.3 OSS, 67mm filter thread, 524 grams, 1:2.857x maximum magnification, 30-50cm MFD (improved over original MFD of 45cm!)

Yay the lens release button is on the inside, to make it easy like the K-mount.

Woohoo, 18mm flange distance! Hello Noktor 50mm F0.95!

Oh and of course – tilt/shift adapters! You know what would be very fun? Pentax K-mount APS-C pancakes! Heck we have 7.5mm of adapter space for the Samsung NX 30mm F2.0.

We’ll finally get videos using the 135mm STF!

Future Firmware Upgrades

“The firmware to enable 3D Sweep Panorama function will come in July, downloadable via Sony�s website.”

“The camera outputs them to an MP0 file – an industry standard for 3D images so they can play back on most 3D HDTVs and monitors. ”
– http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0

Some of us with old screw-driven Sigmas, the Sony 18-70mm F3.5-5.6 DT kit lens, and even my Tamron 200-400mm F5.6 LD 75DM, have experienced gear stripping – that is, the internal gear track of the lens has broken, usually a few gear teeth on a plastic track. What does this mean?

I’ll open my gear-stripped Tamron 200-400mm to show you! I’ve sent this to repair before, but they said they were out of parts (this is the first generation of this lens, and the second-generation 200-400mm was then made obsolete with the Tamron 200-500mm F5-6.3.

The symptom of a gear-stripped lens is simple – mount the lens on camera, turn it on, and the camera will focus the lens to infinity… and it will start vibrating and making a loud whirring sound there. The reason is that the gear cannot catch onto the teeth because it is broken. You can then change your camera to manual focus, and then turn it towards close focus. Auto focus may work, but if you miss and the camera hunts, it will get stuck at infinity and vibrate again.

Note that this does not only happen to Alpha-mount lenses – Nikon F-mount lenses can get it too. Also, this was a good reason for Sony to dump the 18-70mm for the Sony 18-55mm F3.5-5.6 DT SAM which has a in-lens motor and would not face this problem. Likewise for the Sigma lenses with HSM – they would not face this problem.

Anyway, the A-mount is rather simple from the back – there is a black shield piece (in between the metal mount and the rear optics.) You need to remove this first.

Note that the information chip gets in the way – so you gotta pull it aside without breaking it. Here, the black shielding piece is removed. The black-colored metal piece with two silver screws close together, is the aperture lever, and the other black-colored metal piece with two widely spaced silver screws, opens and closes the aperture blades by transferring motion to the aperture pin.

After removing the metal mount, I could remove the gears – here, it changes the gear ratio to a much slower one. Note the large gear in the bottom-right – this is in contact with the gear track. The screw drive of the camera connects to the shaft in the top-right. All metal.

I then removed the rear lens collar bit, and viola! Here’s the broken gear track. The broken teeth are in the top-right corner. The hole is where the aforementioned large gear transfers rotation to the lens.

In theory, I could drive a nail down where I have marked it in red, to prevent the lens from getting to infinity (and thus getting stuck on the broken gear teeth.) However, my later pictures will show you why it can’t be done.

The screw drive shaft, and the aperture uh… pin.

I then removed the outer part, with the focal lengths marked. As it turns out, the gear track is on that big long plastic tube in the top-left!

If I had embedded a nail, it would have stopped the big long plastic tube from rotating. 🙁

I removed the big long plastic tube with the gear track. This is almost as long as the lens, when retracted! No wonder the gear track is not made of metal – if it was, it would make the lens a lot heavier, and the focusing would be slower due to the weight.

Slightly out of focus, and to the right, is a rod that grabs onto a pin that pulls the focusing group nearer or further, to focus.

My thumb is holding that pin. Here it is at minimum focus distance. If I let go, it will roll down, and focus on infinity.

Fully extended. The gold-plated track tells the chip what the focal length is.

I also peeled off the label on the focus ring, but I could not unscrew the screws (they were too tight) so I couldn’t open it any further. 🙁

My initial plan was to stop the lens from going to infinity, but seeing how it wasn’t possible (the focus ring would’ve been my last hope) I ended up reassembling the lens but leaving the screw drive shaft out. So there is a hole where the screw drive used to be, and the camera will try to spin its screw in there if in AF. Focus confirm, autoexposure and SteadyShot work fine. I just have to manually focus, but at least it doesn’t have the annoying gear-stripped symptoms. Also, since there is no screw drive, manual focus is very, very smooth!

This just in – another leak at a bar! This time, the supposed Sony NEX-3, a compact Interchangeable Lens Camera!

Picture taken from:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/26/sony-gives-nex3-and-nex5-names-to-its-first-ultra-compact-interc/

Note the top flips up to reveal an accessory connector (probably for electronic viewfinder, flash or even a supposed optical viewfinder!)

There appears to be a screw mount instead of Minolta’s classic quick-release (which is a shame). It seems that the add-on flash is fastened by tightening the knob.

The flash looks too small to be powered by AAA batteries – perhaps it will take power from the camera.

On the plus side, it has stereo microphones!

The 16mm F2.8 pancake looks a bit long. I hope this is not the case.

It looks like the mount sticks out a fair bit… so I am not so confident of it achieving the 20mm back flange distance that the Micro Four-Thirds mount has. The shorter the back flange distance, the more lenses can fit, of other mounts.

Supposing the lens filter size was 49mm (as rumored) and the width of the filter measured is 133 pixels, the maximum thickness of the camera from mount to rear is 95 pixels. This means a maximum thickness of 49mm/133*95 = 35mm.

However if I measured from the lens mount to the accessory connector’s screw I get 56 pixels, letting the flange distance be 49mm/133*56 = 20.6mm!

This is, of course, give or take parallax error.

Mounts with shorter back flange distances, can accept lenses with longer back flange distances, using an adapter without any glass, thus keeping all the image quality.

And now, for another shot from a while ago, from a future Sony Alpha 700 replacement with AVCHD video recording.

This is a future entry-level Sony Alpha also with AVCHD video recording. Yes it has a mike, and AF/MF switch on body, meaning it will still support screw-drive lenses.

This is from a trade show – note how important movie recording is on these new compact Alphas, to warrant its own button.

Meanwhile, in other mounts, I spotted this at Pikom PC Fair 2010 – the Olympus Micro Four-Thirds 9-18mm F4-5.6! Supremely compact for an ultra-wide angle. It’s no bigger than your standard 50mm F1.4!

And here’s the Samsung NX10 with the Samsung 55-200mm F4-5.6 OIS and an external flash.

The NX10 fits the Samsung 30mm F2.0 pancake better. This is a hollowed mock, though.

The Epson V300 Photo, a really affordable film scanner! This goes for under RM500.

Warga emas.

Guitar Hero 5, coming up for World Cyber Games! Are times exciting or what?

In other news, I got myself a chipped adapter for my Opteka 85mm F1.4. Thanks cjlai for installation! I had to file down the inner curve of the chip using my screwdriver’s ridged handle, as at infinity, the lens would push the chip out a bit and cause it to be unable to mount.

Ah, clearance! It now allows my 85mm to work with the A900 in Aperture Priority, and allows focus confirm, focus trap (with Focus Priority enabled) and Intelligent Preview. Sweet! The chip reports 50mm F1.4 though.