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Author Topic: Canon equivalent of new Nikon lenses?  (Read 7307 times)

Andre Benschop

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Canon equivalent of new Nikon lenses?
« on: December 15, 2002, 05:38:03 pm »

[font color=\'#000000\']Hi Bill and all others,

The 12-24 DG lens recently anounced by Nikon is the equivalent of an 18-35 in 35mm (full frame) terms. 12mm in 35mm equivalent would be a major achievement, especially in a zoom lens.
Whether or not Canon will follow Nikon in introducing lenses for non-full frame DSLR's is an unanswered question.
As an aviation enthusiast, I hope Canon will continue releasing non-full frame DSLR's (Wish list : > 8MP with at least 4 FPS and about 1.5 to 1.6 FOV crop factor), so I can use my 300mm f/2.8 to achieve close to 500mm crops.

My take is that Canon will only introduce lenses that will work on all cameras. Chuck..?? Anybody ???
I wonder if the new Nikon lens will work on a (recent) film body or full-frame DSLR (Kodak Pro 14N) and what the image would look like......  

I hope Canon will at least provide us with some information about future releases (or better still, announce introduction) of new lenses and DSLR's at PMA or Cebit, both in march 2003.
Only time will tell !

Andre Benschop - The Netherlands[/font]
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Canon equivalent of new Nikon lenses?
« Reply #1 on: December 15, 2002, 06:12:14 pm »

[font color=\'#000000\']Have a look at my just published essay on the topic.

Food for thought.

Michael[/font]
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Canon equivalent of new Nikon lenses?
« Reply #2 on: December 15, 2002, 08:56:58 pm »

[font color=\'#000000\']I'm sorry if my essay is construed as Nikon bashing. Far fromt it. I made my living with Nikon gear for a great many years and have great respect for the company and the products.

I write about products that interest me. As a Canon owners this of course means Canon gear, but it also includes Hasselblad, Fuji, Mamiya, Leica and a range of other cameras.

Similarly I primerily review Epson printers, because that's what I use and that's what I believe to be the current state-of-the-art. But I also have reviewed Canon and other printers when possible.

Since this site is not a commercial venture, trying to please a wide audience and advertisers with a please-everyone-and- satisfy-no-one approach, I suppose that it will appear to be biased. That is not the case. Some of my best friends own Nikons :-)

Michael[/font]
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David Mantripp

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Canon equivalent of new Nikon lenses?
« Reply #3 on: December 16, 2002, 09:14:42 am »

[font color=\'#000000\']yeah, yeah, Nikon Schmikon...where's my digital Xpan, that's what I want to know.[/font]
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David Mantripp

Rainer SLP

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Canon equivalent of new Nikon lenses?
« Reply #4 on: December 17, 2002, 07:00:31 pm »

[font color=\'#000000\']Hi Brenton,

What is the resolution of a 35mm fullframe lens nowadays? How do you know that these lenses do not resolve down to 2 microns? just because in Analogfilm the grain is limiting the lens resolution?

If I analize this thread I noticed that a lot of people are victims of clever Public Relation and Advertising campaigns!

Glass is Glass and there is were the limitations are or has Nikon discovered a new type of Glass?

Is it not so that now that we have the tiny digital chips, our engineers in designing lenses have a more comfortable life by using the well known 35mm full frame lenses and their optics and cheat us and say WOW we designed a superb new wide angle lens?

What they did is design a lousy 12mm wide angle lens for 35mm full frame and present the good inner image circle as the latest wisdom as a superb 18mm wide angle lens for their smaller chips?

And we consumers are delighted to hear about the High NASA technology Nikon is smearing under our Noses?

Come on guys. Analize this a little bit better and you will see that a

Canon 16 - 35mm zoom with f2.8

for 35mm full frame is a far better achievement

than that lousy

Nikon 12 - 24mm zoom with f4.0

which Nikon is presenting us as the " Latest of the Latest Lens technology " for making us believe that they still are on the Top.

Yes they are still on the Top by having an excellent Marketing Department

and yes with the digital cameras our quality standards are sinking in regard to  optics or lenses.

and yes we are slowly but steadily beeing driven to a digital consuming herd and it all began with the cell phones   :D

Wake Up  :angry:[/font]
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Rainer SLP

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Canon equivalent of new Nikon lenses?
« Reply #5 on: December 20, 2002, 07:02:41 pm »

[font color=\'#000000\']WOW

Nikon must be incredible good

a f4.0 glass at the price of a f2.8 ?

How much VAT do you pay in UK? 16%

take a look here for the price of a Canon 16-35mm f2.8

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bh4.sph....840DCC0

I am glad I chose Canon 28 years ago  :p[/font]
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Bill Lawrence

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Canon equivalent of new Nikon lenses?
« Reply #6 on: December 15, 2002, 10:15:10 am »

[font color=\'#000000\']Hi All,

I saw this release from Nikon on Steve's Digicams:

http://www.steves-digicams.com/pr/nikon_12122002_pr.html

Nikon is coming out with a wide angle zoom (12-24 mm in 35mm terms) made specifically for the D100/D1, which gives a wide angle option for these cameras.

Anyone have a clue if Canon is considering the same thing?  Being a D60 owner, I am drooling at the thought.  Of course, there is the 1Ds, but I wouldn't mind a slightly cheaper option for having wide angle capability in a digital SLR...

Bill[/font]
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Bill Lawrence
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David Mantripp

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Canon equivalent of new Nikon lenses?
« Reply #7 on: December 15, 2002, 05:55:15 pm »

[font color=\'#000000\']It's strange that they introduce a new lens for their DSLR frame, with optimised circular coverage, therefore lower than 35mm, but inscribe the zoom barrel with 35mm (not "35mm equivalent") focal lengths.  They even describe it in 35mm terms (14-24).

Sounds like serious manoeuvering in the marketing department....

And as for "you don't have to buy a new body to do wide angle digital photography" (press release) -- sure you don't....just a whole bag full of new DG lenses  ::[/font]
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jdemott

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Canon equivalent of new Nikon lenses?
« Reply #8 on: December 15, 2002, 08:32:19 pm »

[font color=\'#000000\']Obviously, the Nikon announcement raises some interesting questions, since, as Michael notes, it implies a divergence between the format of the current D series cameras and a full frame format.  As the owner of a D100, two Nikon film SLRs and a kit of Nikon glass, I would be concerned if I felt that Nikon was abandoning full frame as a viable format.  I'm very much looking forward to the time when Nikon has a direct competitor to the Canon 1DS offering medium format type quality in a 35mm package, something that most of the commentators continue to say will be soon announced.  

Michael's essay, however, misses several possible explanations for the DX series of lenses, ones which make more sense from a marketing standpoint.  

First, if you spend much time following the posts at a digital photography website like dpreview, you will find that a huge number of  digital photography enthusiasts who are buying D100s (and D60s) do not come from a 35mm film heritage.  They are not like the typical Luminous Lnadscape reader and they don't have a closet full of high priced Nikon glass--they have a box of old digicams.  Dpreview seems to have hundreds of posts along the lines of "I just ordered a D100 and now I need a lens; what should I buy."  These customers would presumably be very happy with lenses that fit only D series cameras.

Second, Thom Hogan (who makes much of his living writing about Nikon digital SLRs) notes that the DX series of lenses are believed to have a  higher level of optical resolution than current full frame Nikon glass--a level that would be far higher than the resolution of any of the current less-than-full-frame sensors.  This implies that Nikon's product development pipeline also includes some higher resolution cameras, using the smaller format.  For many users, including many pros, resolutions somewhere in the 6-10 MP range may be all they ever need.  If that is available in a small, lightweight package and it provides all the quality you need, why buy a big honker like a 1Ds and why carry around all that big glass?

Third, even those of us who want maximum image quality with the ability to make large, highly detailed prints also often want a smaller lightweight package for travel, street photography, etc.  Michael said as much in the most recent Video Journal when he described taking the battery pack off his D60, something I sometimes do with my D100.  I already have one lens that is my all-in one travel lens, a 28-105mm that I use when I want to travel light but that I almost never use when I have my full kit available.  I can certainly see the attraction of a  high quality, lightweight all-in-one lens designed just for digital and I wouldn't mind buying one as a travel lens even if it didn't work with my other cameras.

Overall, it is a new marketing concept and it will be interesting to see how it plays out in the new digital world.

Finally, I was rather disappointed to see Michael's essay--not because it isn't a worthwhile topic for discussion, but because it seemed rather odd for a site that covers almost exclusively Canon products suddenly to come out with a piece of Nikon bashing.  If Luminous Landscape had been covering both Nikon and Canon product announcements right along, the essay might make sense, but for a 99 percent Canon site to come out with "whither Nikon" feels a bit like something written by Canon's PR department.  My feeling on the Nikon vs Canon wars is that we are all better served by having multiple strong competitors.  Most of us have to be content living with the strengths and weaknesses of one system or the other, so all the discussions about who is the best are both boring and useless.  Fortunately, Luminous Landscape has been largely free of Nikon vs Canon nonsense;  I hope it will stay that way.[/font]
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John DeMott

James Pierce

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Canon equivalent of new Nikon lenses?
« Reply #9 on: December 16, 2002, 01:29:44 am »

[font color=\'#000000\']As you would know michael I don't quite agree with you.  I've though more about this as well and I think there is a place for both full frame and APS frame cameras.  Espically as more and more shooters will be pure digital.

For the benifit of others - have a look here to see what I think.

http://www.photo.net/bboard....ied_p=1[/font]
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Brenton

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Canon equivalent of new Nikon lenses?
« Reply #10 on: December 16, 2002, 06:54:07 pm »

[font color=\'#000000\']For almost the first time, I have to disagree with Michael Reichmann: I expect the trend to a smaller image size with lenses of correspondingly smaller image circle in mainstream DSLR's is as inevitable as the progression of mainstream enthusiast level film photography from large format to medium to 35mm, and that Nikon and Canon probably look forward to displacing medium format with their 35mm format DSLR lines while offering cheaper, more compact and all round more convenient "half-frame" DSLR's that still match or exceed the quality of 35mm film for most purposes, including a good amount of professional and serious artistic work.

It would be great to have a common lens series for DSLR's of different frame sizes, but that denies the laws of optics; designing a lens of given focal length for a smaller image circle givs added design flexibility that allows improved resolution (in lp/mm, not total lines), not to mention size and cost advantages. To suggest a single lens line for significantly different sensor sizes is like suggesting that companies like Pentax and Contax should use one series of lenses, all with medium format image circle, for both their medium format and 35mm cameras.

In this respect, I would not quickly dismiss the claim of Kodak and Olympus that their proposed 4/3 format allows lenses to have resolution down to 2microns, far smaller than any current 35mm lens.

[The only other serious possibility I see is if "smaller than 35mm format" digital cameras, even ones good enough to displace high end 35mm film equipment, converge on using a permanently attached lens plus supplementaries; less likely, though personally I would love it if quality could be brought up to the standards of good 35mm zoom lenses.][/font]
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Bill Lawrence

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Canon equivalent of new Nikon lenses?
« Reply #11 on: December 16, 2002, 08:37:00 pm »

[font color=\'#000000\']I guess a question is whether Nikon and/or Canon are going to continue making less than 35mm sensors on their DSLRs.  I don't follow the industry closely, but I assume that it is going to be significantly cheaper to produce the smaller ccd/cmos chips for at least several more years.  Will this give the manufacturers enough of a market to produce wide angle lenses geared specifically to these cameras?  I wouldn't get anything but a wide angle geared towards the smaller sensor, but I would pay a fair amount for such a wide angle lens, if it means I don't have to spend $8000 for the 1Ds.[/font]
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Bill Lawrence
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Bob Stevenson

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Canon equivalent of new Nikon lenses?
« Reply #12 on: December 20, 2002, 06:19:47 pm »

[font color=\'#000000\']the latest issue of The British Journal Of Photography puts a slightly different slant to the launch of the Nikon D lens which,...."will be comfortably under £1000"...(!!!?!) The piece claims that Nikon..."has no plans to introduce a full size sensor model",....but will work at developing comparable image quality by...."increasing the pixel count in its 12mm x 15mm sensors".[/font]
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