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Nikonbs new lens mount system General Discussion

dirk

DPRF-Founder
Administrator
According to one of the biggest German photo-magazines (Color Foto), Nikon will come out later this year with a newly designed lens mount (parallel to the old one).

We opened this new thread for you, to give you the opportunity to discuss your thoughts about this step of Nikon.

Would you invest in this new system, do you think Nikon can catch up or surpass Canon with this step?

Dirk
 
When the new lens system is released, I will evaluate how whatever new body is released compares to the Canon offerings and decide whether to switch or not. I'm in no way tied to the Nikon name, I do this for a living and if I have to buy all new lenses anyway, the best camera will win.
 
I don't believe it. 1-The F mount is large enough for 35mm film why would they change it for a 35mm size CCD? 2-Nikon seems committed to increasing the megapixel count on the current size CCD. 3-Nikon is busy designing new DX lenses for the current size CCD. Considering the source of the information, the intent may be to increase participation on a certain new forum that isn't doing too well.
Then again Nikon may have a 10 pound $3000 F2.8G 70-200 IF VR lens on the table just to increase sales.

Tom
 
Can't see why Nikon would introduce a new mount for a full 35mm frame-equivalent CCD because:
a) The current mount easily encompasses the 35mm film frame size
b) The current F-mount doesn't appear to have given Kodak any problems with the new 14n model.

I reckon this is just one of those chinese whispers.
 
Tom,

we are well known that we do NOT spread any fast rumour around - in contrast to many other websites.

1. The source

The source is Color Foto. Color Foto is a highly regarded, very conservative German photomagazine. It is one of the two biggest photomagazine in Germany with over 60000 sold items per month. In the past 10 years, Color Foto only announced so called serious rumours, when it is 99.9% sure that it is true, but officially they were not allowed to say that it is confirmed. Since the article is on the very first page (a full page about it) in the editorial page, they would risk a lot just telling untrue things.

2. It is not the question whether the current lens mount is big enough to COVER the 35mm area. The question is what kind of image quality you get in the corners with the current lens mount size. There is a very interesting thread on the Contaxinfo.com site about this and the official pdf download from Olympus is explaining this with pictures in detail. Look for details on the olympusinfo.com page:

http://www.olympusinfo.com/seiten/downloads.htm

3. There is also in Color Foto the mentioning of a new Nikon Digital camera this year with the current lens mount with 6MP and below the price of the D100. But since this is the name of the game (to introduce almost each year a better model for less money), we did NOT mention this specifically as long as we do not have detailed information what it will look like.

Nigel,

regarding the Kodak, I am still sceptical. I have not read yet anything extremely positive about it except an average recomendation on dpreview. Time will tell whether the number of pixel itself guarantess excellent image quality.

And IMHO I do not believe that a niche market player like Contax is risking to loose its costumers by introducing a new lens mount, if there would not have been significant advantages compared to the old one.

Also the fact that Nikon did not yet said anything about plans with a full frame chip even after 9 months of "Canon 1ds marketing success" makes me cautious...

So with the current information available, there is absolutely no reason NOT to believe this.
 
Here are some copies of the contaxinfo.com thread, where different approaches of different manufacturerss are discussed:

"...Reports are that the Kodak 14n has vignetting problems, so that technique apparently does not mitigate the well depth issue. This was a known issue, and people in industry circles were surprised that Kodak tried this...."

and

"....

Dear all,

Here's what I heard from a friend who works in the IT industry, with some clarifications on CCD vs CMOS I found it extremely helpful in understanding the issues regarding digital photography.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------

Kyocera pulled back N Digital to upgrade the firmware and add in better cooling devices. I have not heard anything regarding to what sensor they will use for the next high end digicam though. With the lesson learned from N Digital and Kodak's 14n, I think Kyocera will be super conservative this time.

The N1/ND was a very ambitious project. Probably it was too ambitious. Kyocera underestimated the engineering efforts around the 6MP Philips sensor. The Philips sensor specs look very good on paper; however, for real world application, it has two major problems: 1. It eats up lots of power. 2. It can generate lots of heat which will increase the noise level. Kyocera had lots of troubles with these two issues. The Philips sensor is Ok for med format digiback because it has the space to install good cooling devices. This is not an option for N1. At the end, Kyocera had to lower the ISO rating to reduce the noise. Also, Kyocera was short of software and firmware engineers. Many things could not implemented correctly and on time. Another minor issue is the corner performance. Even with larger N mount and larger image circle of N lenses, the angle which light strikes the micro-lense at the border of CCD is still off too much. This causes some performance degradation with the 17-35 lens.

CMOS sensor indeed has more noises than CCDs. Another problem with CMOS sensor is that it does not have the idea of shutter. I.e. CMOS sensor is always ON. The good news is that the CMOS process allow the designer to put lots of extra circuits to the same chip. A s&ling circuit can be added beside a sensor to monitor its value all the time. When the camera is not doing the shot, the s&ling circuit will record down the noise level in the sensor. When the camera is taking a picture, the s&ling circuit will act like an artifical shutter, record down the sensor value at the end of the shot then decrease the recorded value with the noise value s&led last time to get the real picture value. With this, you will see a very clean image with little noise. The penality is that this will reduce the dynamic range of the sensor. It hurts the tonal gradation as well. This is the main reason you can see why pictures from Canon D60 and 10D all look very clean; however, they look just more fake than S2Pro and D100's. Anyway, almost all CMOS sensor are using this multi-s&ling noise reduction circuit now. Canon is just the first one which used it on consumer digicams.

One more good thing about CMOS sensor is that the sensor pixel is shaped like a tile, more or less like an area sensor. The light which hits any spot on the tile will be recorded. On the other side, CCD sensor pixel shaped more like a well. A micro lens has to be added to the top of a sensor to focus the light to the right spot. This is the main reason that with the Nikon F-mount, Nikon will never be able to produce a full-frame digicam with CCD sensors. The angle of the light path to the film boundary is too narrow for a micro lens to focus light to the sensor.

With CMOS sensors, Canon has more design freedom. The 1Ds uses bascially a sensor made up by two D60/10D sensors.

Kodak's 14n uses a 14MP CMOS sensor from FillFactory. The sensor is actually more hi-tech than Canon's; however, since it has more pixels, each pixel has to be smaller than Canon's. Small pixels means that each pixel will have less area to accept light. With the smaller Nikon F-mount, the pixels around the border have the light angel issue again. Kodak had to add in complex exposure compensation function to correct this problem. Another issue is that the FillFactory chip was noisy... something Kodak had not expected. On paper, the sensor should have a dynamic range around 11.5bit(69db?) but in reality, it is less than that... I think probably FillFactory has tried too many fancy things with their noise reduction circuit which may not work well all the time. On the other side, Canon just relies on some proven brute-force apparoach.

Sure, Kodak also has lousy software engineers such that the post imaging processing is simply not as good as Canon's. It will take a while for things to improve...."

Dirk
 
I imagine that the new lens mount system is a complement to the current system. We do not know to date how large the image circle of the new lenses will be, maybe it covers alot more than 24*36mm. Maybe Nikon is bringing us a system to compete with medium format systems. Time will tell.
 
... no not yet. So we will have to wait til July for the following issues of Color Foto or FotoMagazin to get more information. Surprisingly Color Foto has not updated yet its news-section on their website (as of yesterday). You could see online the cover of the newest edition with the mentioned news, but all news in the newssection are outdated.

Maybe Nikon made a call to Color Foto, if they do not want it to be disclosed yet
happy.gif


Since photomagazines are dependent from theadvertising (and also some internetsites), this can be an "uncomfortable" situation.

But I see it as a positive sign (the articel). It shows the committment of Nikon to catch up market share in Digital. And as long as you can have both, the new and the old lens mount, nobody will have a probelm with it. At least not me...

Dirk
 
Well if they do make a new mount - I sure hope that they make adapters for current F-mount lenses. This way the long/tele lenses (which aren't a problem for digital) can still be used.

I understand the quest for all out image quality with wide angle lenses on Digital platforms, but does the ND have these issues with it's lens mount and using wide angle lenses?
 
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