Nikon Mirrorless: Photographers give their first impressions on the new mirrorless system

Sporgon

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Nov 11, 2012
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I can’t normally bear to watch, or rather listen to T & C, but I watched a bit of the video and what they were saying about IBIS not working so great on older lenses matches my experiences with some of the (albeit not latest generation) Pentax DSLRs. The thought of having Stabilization on all your old lenses reads brilliantly in the spec sheet, but in practice I foound it a bit ‘meh’.

I had / have a similar experience with focus peaking on mirrorless. My initial reaction to using it was how great it was going to be, and how I’d get so much use out of my manual lenses, but as practical experiences began to mount up I found it wasn’t actually as good for me as an ‘S’ type screen in a 5Dii or 6D.
 
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Mar 2, 2012
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I can’t normally bear to watch, or rather listen to T & C, but I watched a bit of the video and what they were saying about IBIS not working so great on older lenses matches my experiences with some of the (albeit not latest generation) Pentax DSLRs. The thought of having Stabilization on all your old lenses reads brilliantly in the spec sheet, but in practice I foound it a bit ‘meh’.

With older lenses, it drops from 5 axes to only 3. Presumably the lens must supply some info for the full 5-axis system.
 
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Mar 2, 2012
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You can expect the same from Canon, (presumably) IBIS of three stops, and works with exiting OS lenses to give 5 stops in combination.....
Likewise for Sony, although I don't think it's using in-lens stabilization to augment IBIS for a combined 5 axes. Rather, the camera needs to know focal length and subject distance for full support, and not all lenses can provide that data.

[Edit]
Here is some pertinent information:
“It needs focal length and focal distance to provide the correct image stabilization,” [Sony's Mark] Weir said. “This is standard with everyone’s system as far as we understand it.”

However, the way that it works is totally different for lenses that can communicate with the camera and those that cannot.

“If the lens can communicate the information to the system and the system can understand it, then the system can provide all of the stabilization information,” said Mr. Weir. “In the case that the lens does not provide electronic communication, the user can manually enter in the focal length.”

But in that case, the camera can still only have the focal length input, and not the focal distance–which has to do with how far away from the sensor the lens is. From the focal length information, it can figure out the right amount of pitch and yaw to provide. However, roll compensation doesn’t require any information from the lens because it is always available. Roll compensation is all based on how the user moves the camera around as you can see in the graph above.

“The behavior of the system is largely dependent on the lens. The lens bears a responsibility if it’s going to enjoy five axis stabilization. It needs to provide focal length and focal distance to the system. But we put in a provision for you to manually put in the focal length. But you cannot put in focus distance. We thought that would be pretty cumbersome.”
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