Panasonic has announced three lenses to kick off its Lumix S
lens range. They are a 24-105mm f/4 standard zoom lens, a 50mm f/1.4 fast prime
and a 70-200mm f/4 constant aperture telephoto zoom.
The lenses are based around the Leica L-Mount as part of an
‘L-Mount Alliance’ announced last year between Panasonic, Leica and Sigma. It’s
especially important that Panasonic gets lenses out for its new system as soon
as possible because unlike Canon and Nikon, its other new full frame mirrorless
competitors, Panasonic doesn’t have a full frame DSLR lens range to fall back
on. Sony already has a large range of native E-mount lenses for its own full
frame cameras.
All three new lenses are dust and splash resistant and designed
to operate at temperatures as low as -10 degrees, to match the weatherproofing
standards of the Lumix S1 and S1R cameras. A nice touch is that all three
lenses share a 77mm front filter attachment ring.
They use a sophisticated autofocus motor system operating at the
same high data communication frequency (480fps) as the cameras and their new
Venus processors. The new lenses are aimed at both stills and video, and
designed to suppress ‘focus breathing’, where the focal length and hence
magnification shifts as the lens focuses – this is a common problem with
regular lenses in video recording.
LUMIX S 24-105mm F4 MACRO
O.I.S.
LUMIX S PRO 50mm F1.4
LUMIX S PRO 70-200mm F4
O.I.S.
These three lenses are a solid start for Panasonic’s Lumix S
lens system, and the company is promising to have at least 10 lenses for the
system by 2020. Further lenses are already available from Leica, and Sigma is
set to launch more than a dozen lenses for the mount this year.
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