GHarris
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 Re: Upcoming Compact Full Frame A7C?!?! | |
chiron wrote:
GHarris wrote:
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 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, or marry the very promising-looking and already maturing Sony 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. 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.
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.
I was speculating very loosely about the possibility of a new mount, so even if you were to be correct, we are just jawing around here and enjoying ourselves in a sort of excited late-at-night moment before a dawn.
But it is also true that a new mount doesn't mean abandoning other mounts, certainly not the FE, and the idea of a system as a single vast Canon-like array with a single mount stretching to the horizon for all purposes and all photographers may no longer be the best way to think about a system in a time of extremely rapid technological change. It may be better to think about a system as comprising several systems or mounts that optimize performance for different purposes, as many do now with APS-C and FE, not to mention their i-phone. And Sony has officially committed to a design philosophy of making cameras for more specific purposes--thus the ZV-1 and the A9II, which each serve very specific needs.
Given the rate of technological change in electronics and manufacturing, more specific applications make sense. As long as you can get the lenses you need for the bodies you own, and those bodies are optimized for your purposes, different mounts could make a lot of sense.
On the other hand, this is really just all wild speculation and fun at this point! 
iPhones, RX100s, ZV-1s... they're all, in a sense, disposable. Right from the start, there's no upgrade path. You have to replace the whole thing when you upgrade, and you're never led to think otherwise.
And they're much cheaper.
The huge expense of high-end interchangeable bodies and high-end interchangeable lenses creates a very different world. There are inevitably lots of potential customers who want to feel that they are going to have a long-term return and flexibility on their investment.
You can tell yourself, "I can cover so many bases with this fancy lens purchase. It can produce amazing high-resolution landscape shots on my slow but high-res "R" body. It can gather lots of light to freeze the motion for action-shooting on my less-sharp but super-responsive a9 body. And in three years' time, it'll work amazingly well with whatever camera body they'll release next... and it's exciting and reassuring to know that that will happen - there *will* be compatible future camera bodies for many years to come, getting ever more responsive, ever faster at AF, ever higher in resolution."
And so you open your wallet - with confidence.
As soon as Sony release a 2nd high-end enthusiast interchangeable mount, every potential customer is going to ask themselves: "OK, so which of these two systems is going to turn out to be VHS, and which one is going to be Betamax? One of them is going to turn out to be a dead-end. I don't feel I can confidently put my cash down on the counter and take a risk."
I think Sony are going to have to stick with the E-mount for multiple years more before they rock the boat with a curved-sensor mount or anything else disruptive. And I'm OK with that. There's still room for improvement in the pure sheer performance of existing E-mount cameras and lenses - more and more high-end and exotic glass and creative design, faster and better sensors, faster and sharper EVFs, faster burst modes and card slots, new video modes, new wired and wireless connectivity and control options. Smart in-camera image processing.
The wide scope / rich potential for fast-moving technological advancement that you mention is almost entirely unrelated to curved sensors. It's advancement on all fronts, with the current, fully-capable mount system. DSLR was holding so much of the user experience and the technological growth of cameras back. Curved sensors only help with one single thing: potentially, the size and weight of a lens of a given optical quality. Only that. It doesn't revolutionize how autofocus works, how viewfinders work, how video works. It's just (theoretically/hopefully) a smaller lens for a given quality level. Only that. No small thing, but not enough to upset your pretty position in the market with high consumer confidence and trust in future purchasing options.
I don't think Canon would have released two separate, incompatible mirrorless mounts if they had thought it through. They released the APS-C mirrorless mount because they weren't thinking far enough ahead. Let your customers feel confident that their investment in your system is going to pay off, and they'll spend more, again and again, down the years. Whereas personally, if someone were to say to me, "I want to buy an APS-C camera, I'm considering various options, what do you think about Canon?". I'd tell them to avoid the M mount, because for all we know it will quietly die out once RF matures and can cover all the bases. It barely feels like a completely viable system as-is, with its lack of different body options and price-points. And you can't help but doubt how long there will be new toys released for that system. Because it's already somewhat of a dead-end, with a bigger and more capable and incompatible newer RF system receiving all the R&D and prestige.
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