Reuters reports that Sony is acquiring the Toshiba image sensor business. This is quite a big news! Both Toshiba tech and production facility will help Sony to increase their market share. Right now Sony produces 40% of the worldwide sensor production.

I am wondering how other companies like Samsung and Canon can keep up with Sony’s sensor powers. Maybe in 2-3 years from now Sony’s E-mount cameras will be a generation ahead over the competition…

There is a list of PhotoPlus specials running at BHphoto (Click here to see them all).

And there is another new deal: You get the 55mm FE Zeiss lens for $729 and 3 years US seller warranty at [shoplink 41837 ebay]GetDigital on eBay (Click here)[/shoplink].

A long list of new refurbished Sony items can be found on Amazon and eBay. Here a few of the hottest deals with link to the ebay page:
[shoplink 41843 ebay]Sony A7s $1899[/shoplink].
[shoplink 41844 ebay]Sony A7r $1299[/shoplink].
[shoplink 41840 ebay]55mm FE for $749[/shoplink].
[shoplink 41841 ebay]24-240mm FE for $749[/shoplink].
[shoplink 41842 ebay]Sony A7 $829[/shoplink].
[shoplink 41846 ebay]18-200mm APS-C E-mount lens for $569[/shoplink].

Lensrentals tested a few E-mount lenses and confirms that Sony has some issues on delivering consistent quality on their lenses. There are larger copy-to-copy variations than with Nikon and Canon lenses.

Mostly we are just starting with FE lens testing. Over the next few weeks, we should get a good handle on how the Sony lenses compare to each other.
I think there’s no question we’ve seen support for what a lot of people are claiming: the [shoplink 41854 ebay]35mm f/1.4 ZA lens[/shoplink] is very likely to have some tilt with one corner or side out of the plane of focus. Depending on what you photograph this may make no difference to you, or may be a huge issue. But I doubt sending copy after copy back is going to make much difference (you may trade a soft right upper corner for a slightly soft left side, etc.). We’ve taken a couple of these apart and there’s not a ton of optical adjustments that can be made: there are a set of shims behind the front group that can be modified a bit, but it’s a crude and very time-consuming adjustment, so I don’t think it’s generally going to be something that can be fixed.
The [shoplink 41856 ebay]55mm f/1.8[/shoplink] is really a good lens, very sharp and consistently made. The [shoplink 41855 ebay]90 mm f/2.8[/shoplink] is a decent lens, reasonably sharp, but there seems to be a fair bit of copy-to-copy variation in overall sharpness.
All that being said, these lenses may look better on-camera than on the optical bench because there seems to be at least some modification of files as the raw is written. We’ll get a better handle on that as we test more lenses.

In short: Sony really has to improve the quality control on the production chain.

Diglloyd posted two new A7rII articles:
Understanding Compression of the Sony A7R II Uncompressed ARW Raw Format
and
Reader Question: Convert to DNG for Sony’s Space-Wasting 14-bit Uncompressed RAW Files?.

And here are two key insights he shares about the new A7rII uncompressed RAW format:

1) The Sony A7R II captures 14 bits per photosite. The Sony uncompressed raw format then stores these 14 bits in 16 bits, bloating the file by 14%. In other words, Sony wastes about 9MB per image for no value or purpose at all. So Sony users lose triply: wasted storage, degraded camera responsiveness, fewer shots before the camera buffer fills.

2) A lossless-compressed format can save far more than even the bit packing mentioned above. Nikon and Canon use Huffman encoding. But it might be that the CPU in the Sony cameras is not fast enough for Huffman encoding?

In short, we would all save space, time and have a faster camera if Sony could add lossless-compressed files and not use the 16bit format. Let’s hope Sony has this on their todo list for the next firmware update!

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Sony A7rII store links to [shopcountry 41860].

[shoplink 41868 ebay][/shoplink]

It’s still almost impossible to find the Batis lenses in Stock. So you may jump on this one:
Two Batis 85mm Batis lenses are for sale at [shoplink 41868 ebay]eBay UK (Click here)[/shoplink]. Comes with three years Zeiss warranty and ships worldwide.
They also have two Batis 25mm lenses for sale again through their [shoplink 41870 ebay]eBay UK store (Click here)[/shoplink]

Batis store links:
Zeiss Batis 85mm f/1.8 lens in US at Adorama, Bhphoto. In Eu at Amazon DE, WexUK. In Asia at Digitalrev.
Zeiss Batis 25mm f/2.0 lens at Adorama, Bhphoto. In EU at Amazon DE, WexUK. In Asia at Digitalrev.