Sony Japan announced that it will release a firmware update for the A7rII in mid October. And it will add the 14bit uncompressed RAW file option!

Kinoshita Optical announced the new Kistra 55mm f/1.2 lens. It comes in Contax-Yashica mount but it has been designed to be used on Full Frame mirrorless camera. The lens costs about $1,460 and can be bought on [shoplink 40987 ebay]eBay (Click here)[/shoplink]. To use it on your A7 camera you will have to buy the [shoplink 40990 ebay]Yashica to E-mount adapter (Click here)[/shoplink]

The picture on top shows the A7Ii with the new lens. If you wonder what’s the “ornamental” stuff well there is a Biker-friendly ;) strap you get at Rakuten. And the case is the Ulysses case you get on eBay in [shoplink 37912 ebay]Black (Click here)[/shoplink], [shoplink 37913 ebay]Blue (Click here)[/shoplink] or [shoplink 37914 ebay]Brown (Click here)[/shoplink].

Here are the lens specs and MTF graph:

DC.watch posted the first test on the Sony A7II. Here are the images of the lens on the camera (Click on it to enlarge):

And here some image samples all shot at max f/1.2 aperture (Click on it to enlarge):

Image samples on the A7s can be seen here: http://www.kinoshita-optical.com/gallery.html

Kistar 55mm f/1.2 can be purchased on here on [shoplink 40987 ebay]eBay (Click here)[/shoplink].

On the picture above you see the Canon 120 Megapixel FF prototype. Rumor has it the camera will be on market early 2018 only. And there are two main reasons why that camera is interesting for the Sony folks:

1) It will be interesting to see how Sony will react to this. If Canon will release that camera in one year from now Sony will have to answer with a special High Res E-mount camera too.

2) David Candlish pointed out the new kind of issues photographers will have to deal when using such crazy high megapixel numbers. He writes:

• Doing the maths for the new 120 megapixel camera means the maximum aperture usable before diffaction is somewhere between f/4.5-f/5
• The 5DS/5DSR also highlighted that some of Canon’s older or lower-quality lenses were unable to make full use of the improved resolution – quite a number in fact, only ~40% of Canon’s lineup were recommended. With the resolution bar set almost three times higher it will be interesting to see how the percentrage number of recommended lenses which can leverage the full capability of the sensor changes.
• Image size is going to be fun to see too. Already the full resolution RAW files from the 5DS/R and A7RII cause noticeable lag when loading & processing in Lightroom, even in top-end machines, so tripling the amount of data will magnify that issue. Storage space is a consideration too, even though cards & drives are getting cheaper & larger all the time.

P.s.: Full Canon NYC show coverage info at CanonWatch.

Image courtesy: Hank Dietz: http://aggregate.org/DIT/KARWY/

Professor Hank Dietz from the University of Kentucky sent me this:

I’ve now posted a Beta-test version of a free software tool I’ve been developing to perform credible repair of Sony ARW2 artifacts. It isn’t perfect, but it does quite well converting an ARW2 raw file into a repaired raw wrapped as a DNG. The research project homepage (at the University of Kentucky Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering) is:
http://aggregate.org/DIT/KARWY/
The online WWW form interfaced version of KARWY is linked from there. It can be used without having to install any software.

Thanks Professor!

A7rII store list:
In USA: at Amazon, BHphoto, Adorama, SonyStore US, FocusCamera, Uniquephoto.
In Europe at Amazon DE, Amazon UK, Wex UK and ParkCameras.
In Asia at Digitalrev, CameraPro.

The A7sII preorder list:
In USA at Amazon, BHphoto, FocusCamera, Adorama.
In Europe at WexUK.
In Asia soon at Digitalrev.

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX10 II added to studio test scene comparison (Dpreview).
27 Impressive Numbers You Need to Know About The World’s Largest Digital Camera (Explora).
Sony 16-35mm Vario-Tessar T FE F4 ZA OSS Review by Melly Lee
Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX500 Review (Photographyblog).
Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX10 Mark II Review : Introduction (ePhotozine).
The “all-purpose” lens for the A7 series – Sony 24-240mm f/3.5-6.3 Review (Mirrorlessons).

Florian: “WAITING PROJECT With Sony AS7: http://www.waitingproject.com/fr/page_11971.html”

Thomas: “Greetings from North Germany! Thanks for hosting the exciting and truly informative Sony rumors site! Happy to receive all the daily updates!
 I’d like to advise you and the German community of Sony shooters of the upcoming travel guide on “111 Orte die man im Braunschweiger Land gesehen haben muss” (111 Places in the greater Brunswick area you must not miss):
http://www.emons-verlag.de/programm/111-orte-im-braunschweiger-land-die-man-gesehen-haben-muss.
 The book is part of the popular 111 Places series of Cologne-based emons publisher (http://www.emons-verlag.de/programm?seite=1).
 The author Axel Klingenberg and me shared the picture-taking job. I did 60 motifs out of the total number of 111. During my work for the book, I relied on the exceptional performance of the Sony A7. The camera was equipped in 95 % of all cases with the Sonnar 35 mm 2.8 prime, my absolute favorite FE all-rounder. A smaller number of the photos were taken with the Sonnar T FE 55mm F1,8 ZA (I adore for its fantastic sharpness) and my Leica X1. I am a RAW shooter and process my pictures with Lightroom. Since I love street photography, I chose the Sony full-frame line-up for its small, unobtrusive bodies and exceptional Zeiss prime lenses.
 If you are interested, you may check out the “Making Of” portfolio for the book project on my website at http://www.hackenberg.info/portfolio/111-orte-im-braun-schweiger-land-making-of/. Here I’ve uploaded a selection of shots for the places introduced in the book that I visited.
Thanks for taking the time to watch.
Take care, Thomas.“

Meyer Goerlitz successfully founded the lens project via Kickstarter. Now you can preorder the lens at meyer-optik-goerlitz.com/kickstarter_trioplan/. It costs 1399 Euro and will ship in February. Not really a cheap lens. But the lens is said to give you an extreme and unique bubble effect like this:

You like it?