GHarris
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 Re: Upcoming Compact Full Frame A7C?!?! | |
chez wrote:
I hope it's not a new mount. Would love to use those compact lenses on my other cameras. What would a new mount bring to the table?
Am I really the only one thinking this?
A new mount would bring market-death for Sony. (exaggeration, sure, but I wanted to be blunt)
One of Sony's greatest attractions/strengths is that they jumped first, with good timing, onto a new, forward-looking, mirrorless mount with a long and bright future. The E mount, whose specs were good enough (the "oh but it's not wide enough" panic/speculation, for example, never amounted to much of substance), and for which they had a big head-start in bringing out a full, rounded lineup of high-quality lenses. Those lenses were brought out with the new and upcoming high-resolution sensors in mind, so the E-mount lenses were generally much sharper - flat-out better - that a lot of what you could buy for the other manufacturers' old DSLR systems, whose lenses had been designed and released years before when the impending need for high optical resolution was not well foreseen and planned for.
You knew you were buying into a system with a long future. The E-mount was as technically capable as it needed to be. You could buy one of the sharp early-release lenses and know that, to make up for its cost and the speedbump of buying a new set of lenses/new system, you'd be using most of your early lens purchases for many years to come, on many generations of camera bodies. There wouldn't be many ways in which an early E-mount lens wouldn't be good enough many years later - they were sharp, they had good autofocus tech, they had a future. They were expensive relative to most DSLR lenses (which had both a saturated market and lower manufacturing standards in their favour on cost), but the price made sense given the E mount system's long and bright future ahead.
Once Sony's E mount was on the scene, if you bought into DSLR bodies and lenses, you knew you were buying into a system with a dying future. Mirrorless was coming, and you were going to have to either:
- intend to stay with what would, one day, be a dead-end DSLR ecosystem (a cheap one with lots to buy second-hand, perhaps, at least, as the one bright-side),
- or wait for Canon and Nikon to take years to bring out their own mirrorless mounts (how long would that take? How long to be mature? Why wait?),
- or marry the very promising-looking and already-maturing Sony E ecosystem.
If Sony come out with a new mount now, so soon, it will destroy confidence in the future of E-mount bodies, accessories, and lenses. Sony, despite being the upstart, the cutting-edge player in the market, are also the established, proven, "does it all" mirrorless player right now. A very nice position to be in, which is why their market share tends to grow. They'd throw that all away with a new mount.
A new mount launch is traumatic to consumer confidence. They don't know which product line has a future any more. Whether they should stop spending, stop upgrading, stop committing any further to the system they're using / considering using... to see how things settle out. When a mount system is very, very old, and its death is anticipated (as with the ancient Canon and Nikon DSLR mount standards) that's OK, expected even, accepted by the consumer. When the mount you're creating competition for, under your own brand (does the start of this sentence really not sound insane to anyone else, btw?) is still new, and cutting-edge, you're just undermining confidence in your own product and making people feel that "buying into" your system, marrying one mount standard or another, is reckless. These cams/lenses are so expensive that you want to help justify the purchases to yourself by knowing that you can continue to swap and tweak and upgrade the parts of your system, with new and better bodies, new unique lens releases, etc... for many long years to come.
"I know there will be plenty of new, cutting-edge camera bodies released in coming years, so I can justify this expensive lens purchase." Or: "I know there will be plenty of funky, interesting new lenses coming out for many years, because this mount is still young and has all the tech it needs to have... so I can justify this expensive camera-body purchase".
Maybe it's just me! But I think Sony would be crazy to introduce a new mount.
Someone mentioned, as an argument for this "new mount" idea, that other manufacturers already do it... Canon have their R mount and their APS-C mirrorless mount. Sure.
But that's a weakness, not a strength. You strand APS-C customers, you give them no growth space. Because of the split systems they can't justify a nice high-end full-frame lens purchase, that is a financial stretch, to themselves by saying "it's useful now in this way on my APS body... and when I maybe go to FF one day, it'll still be very useful at a different effective focal length". With Sony, you have everything, at a top tier of tech and capability and sharpness, and a still-young system that feels like it has a long, confidence-inspiring future... all in one good E mount. Why would they blow that apart?
Curved sensors might be a revolution one day, sure. In half a decade or more. But it could only be poison to their brand, to their appeal, right now. They've got a uniquely complete and capable and reliable mirrorless system. It's a golden goose they'd be fools to slaughter.
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