Oh boy oh boy oh boy. OH BOY. Stream-of-thought post incoming.
So, the D FA* 85 will have a focus on well corrected aberrations while keeping a beautiful bokeh. Eat your heart out, DPR!
They have physical black/silver prototypes for the D FA 21 LTD. It looks like the shorter cousin of the 31! Adorable, and a credible threat to my wallet
. I can't wait to see their idea of an UWA with Limited rendering. I like that they use the same focus rings as in the rest of the princesses. Did they say it will be great for 3D pop with great bokeh? On an UWA? Okay my wallet is shaking already.
Now they mounted it on a K-1. Forget what I said, it's the slightly bigger cousin of the 31! Darn, I was getting
too excited. The wallet breathes a sigh of relief and the M20/4 hopes for a lot of "every-gram-counts" hikes. And at 14:37 on the video it can be seen that it's either KAF-4 or the mockup simply doesn't have a mechanical aperture lever.
The DA* 16-50/2.8 PLM looks every bit as premium as it can. Shame it won't come out with the K-new but if the IQ improves on the weak spots of the premium lens it should be a cracker with the PLM.
More compact and affordable lenses in the future! Honestly the 21 isn't *that* large, and if the weight is low it's all good, but can't beat a pancake in size if you want serious IQ
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An OVF with 1.05x mag is gonna be incredible, yay. SR button on the side of the mount? Huh. The padlock button is interesting... what does it do? No articulating screen, bummer. Although if the OVF is even better than the K-1 one I'd gladly drop to the ground for those low-angle shots
. Late 2020 release date probably? Yay.
All in all, excited to see how it all turns out! I'm eagerly awaiting more news for the 21, but it looks that after the consolidation Ricoh is back in the thick of it, this means two fully new lenses in 2021... or later, but let's try not to jinx it
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EDIT: Just checked and the FA Limited all have DOF scales starting at f/4, so no indication of speed on the D FA 21. Maybe f/2.4 because 2.8 is too mainstream?