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Mostly but not entirely garnered from the comments:

• Two lenses extremely far apart in focal length, like a 21mm and a 180mm, or even a 21–35mm and a 400mm. (Not sure what formats were implied in those cases.)

• Two lenses, but on two separate cameras from two different systems. (One reader suggested a DSLR with one lens augmented by a fixed-megazoom digital point-and-shoot. This is somewhat similar to an article Carl wrote for Photo Techniques in about 1998 or so detailing how he used a digicam to "scout" locations for 8x10 work.)

• The exact same lens but on two different formats, resulting in different angles of view. (The example given was two Zeiss 50mm ƒ/1.5's, one on a Leica M9 and the other on an Olympus E-P1.)

• Two primes fairly close to each other—the example given was a 35mm and a 50mm. (Oh, gee, you know who you are.)

• Two lenses of the same focal length but different speeds.

• Owning lots and lots of lenses at home, but only choosing two at a time to take out or travel with.

• A lens with a teleconverter. A variation on this theme: "convertible" view camera lenses, where different combinations of the two lens cells (front, back, or both) result in different focal lengths.

• Two similar lenses, one kept in good shape for everyday shooting and a beater copy for taking into hazardous situations like muddy swamps or seashores with blowing sand and salt spray.

Does that cover the waterfront and then some, or what? Lastly, I have to give smile points to a reader named Adrian, who said that the perfect two-lens kit is... a TLR!

Clever.

Illustration from zeisscamera.com

Mike

Honorable Mention: One of the greatest books of photo reportage in history, David Douglas Duncan's War Without Heroes, was shot entirely with two custom-made Leica M3Ds he wore crossed "bandolier-style" across his chest, one with a Leitz 50mm Summilux-M, and the other with a Nikkor 28mm ƒ/2.8.

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Featured Comment by Dennis: "Mike, The 21–35 and 400 were used with 35mm film. Call it the 'National Park kit.' For when you want to shoot scenics and wildlife and not people. By the way, I like the bunch of lenses at home take on it, because that's my setup, but it didn't occur to me to consider it a 2-lens kit. About half a dozen lenses at home and usually carry one or two, rarely three.

(...Continued from Part I)

...So anyway. I've been writing for photo enthusiasts for an amazing 22 years now, since Darkroom Photography accepted the very first article I wrote. And over the years, not being brain dead, I've naturally developed some personal opinions and theories about how photo enthusiasts tend to think and feel about a wide variety things—filtered, naturally, through my rather idiosyncratic conceptions. One of the more obvious things I've witnessed is that people have gradually had to make a switchover from buying things based on a brief hands-on impression to buying "on paper," by which I mean from research, most of which is done on the internet now. In days of yore, photo-writers like me tended to habitually and casually deride people who made their decisions "standing at the camera counter." Well, careful what you criticize. Nowadays, with traditional camera stores having been decimated at the same time that frequency of purchases has gone way up, most people don't have much choice but to buy things "sight unseen" at least occasionally. I've done it myself, believe it or not. I'm sure that early in my career I expressed the very mission of a camera reviewer as follows: the average buyer only gets to stand at the counter and play with the camera for fifteen minutes. What would he find out after three months that he can't learn in those fifteen minutes? I considered that my basic duty—to tell the prospective purchaser what he would find out for himself if he only had more time. But now...being able to stand at a camera counter and feel and hold whatever you're considering, and click the shutter and work the controls and the lens and see the viewfinder for yourself, well, that's actually something of a luxury now.

The necessity of shopping on paper has led to some curious obsessions. One of them that I became aware of in the early '90s was that some people, for some reason, really wanted to "have all the focal lengths covered." The way you saw this for a while was that good-quality normal zooms would be 35–70mm, or sometimes 28–70mm, and the better quality telephoto zooms were 80–200mms. And people would worry about the ten millimeters in the middle. That didn't make any sense to me then, and it still doesn't, but it was the way a lot of people thought—I heard it a lot. Of course, it only makes no sense if you come from the experience of actually using the lenses. It does make sense (well, a little) if you're just looking at things on paper. And of course some people, when they collected prime lenses, liked to "have everything covered"—they wanted a 20mm and a 24mm and a 28mm and a 35mm and a 50mm and an 85mm and a 105mm and a 135mm and so forth; I'm sure that, for those folks, that thinking carried over into their feelings about zooms.

In about 1993 I did a big survey on CompuServe and wrote up the results for Camera & Darkroom. I was trying to figure out how many lenses most people had and what sort of set was the most common. Without going into all the details blow-by-blow, what I found was that most people owned two or three lenses. Those who owned one prime almost always used a 50mm or a 35mm. Those who used two, as you'd expect, most commonly had a moderate wide-angle and a moderate telephoto. (That was the case with me. I learned on a 50mm, which I used exclusively for three years or so, and then I switched to a 35mm and an 85mm. I had a job for a while where I was supposed to use a 28–70mm zoom, but I'd switch back to my 35/85 combo whenever the boss wasn't looking.) For those who had three lenses, there was more variety—for a fair number of these people, although I think still a minority, one was a zoom, and some people skewed wide or long—one guy shot mainly airplanes in flight and had a 50mm, a 180mm, and a 300mm. Others would have a 20mm, a 28/35, and a 50/55/60. (That included Salgado for a while around that time—he was quoted in one article saying he used a 28mm and a 35mm on Leica M6 cameras and a 60mm macro on a Leica R. That changed in time, naturally.) But for the most part the three-lens kits broke down about how you'd expect—a normal or moderate wide and a short portrait lens, with an extra lens for whatever that person's specialty interest was.

For those who had four lenses, the results were still less conclusive. And when it came to the pros, the data got hard to interpret. Not only do pros have to cover more bases—they never know what they'll encounter—they also had to please art directors and clients (one of my studio partners hated 28mms but kept one around just for when the A.D. would say, "let's see that with a 28"). But a news photojournalist who had recently been written up in the magazine had a kit that was fairly representative at the time: a 20mm, a 35mm, a 105mm, and a 200mm. Even then, though, there were a couple of adventurous pros who were doing most of their work with just two zooms, despite owning a motley of other lenses. One guy was even doing 100% of his work with just two zooms, a 20-35mm and an 80-200mm. Pretty radical, in those days; more common, I'd guess, now.

(After writing this, I got a nice note from Jack Foley, the newsie we featured yesterday. He said that when the Herald News went digital, eight years ago, they issued him an AF-Nikkor 17–35mm ƒ/2.8 and an AF-Nikkor 80–200mm ƒ/2.8—both for use on APS-C cameras—and, according to Jack, "even eight years later, I say that these two are fabulous, wonderful, fantastic hunks of photo gear. Honestly, I cannot imagine a better brace of lenses.")

But getting back to that idea of having all the focal lengths "covered." At about the same time that idea was at its peak, I had a Zeiss Contax 28–85mm ƒ/3.3–4. This covers all the focal lengths I personally ever use. It was a magnificent lens, but very big and heavy (85 x 99.5mm, unextended, and 736g—and it's bigger than those specs imply because it extends quite a bit). At the same time, I was learning about the history of the Tessar, and one of the few remaining true Tessar-types at the time was the Zeiss Contax 45mm ƒ/2.8 (60 x 18mm, and 90g—or just slightly bigger than a body cap!).

So my reasoning was, why "cover" more focal lengths? That's just one sort of versatility. Why not "nest" focal lengths—a prime within the range of the zoom—and give yourself versatility in some other way?

And what are the ways? Well, it strikes me that there are two or three. Let's say your main lens is going to be a big, heavy, expensive, fast, all-purpose zoom with spectacular image quality, and it covers the range you need covered. This is the lens you'll use when you're shooting concertedly and seriously—when you have an assignment, when you've got an extended amount of time exclusively for shooting—when you're really working. Your second lens might serve one of three purposes: it might be small, so you could have something easily portable for going through life with, when you're just carrying your camera around; it could be fast, to make up for the fact that even fast zooms are slow; or it could be a closeup lens—a macro—in case you had a need and a use for that. (This last one made more sense back when most zooms did not focus close, a particular bugbear of the late Herbert Keppler of Popular Photography fame.)

Of course there's a fair amount of overlap between those three purposes. If your main lens is ƒ/3.3–4 like the big Zeiss Contax zoom, then an ƒ/1.7 50mm is pretty fast by comparison, but it's still a heck of a lot smaller and more portable. And many people like using macro lenses as "normals"—Leica even briefly recommended using its 60mm ƒ/2.8 macro R lens as a normal lens.

So, for a while, this was what I recommended as a "perfect two-lens kit." I'd say, sure, go ahead, knock yourself out, go ahead and get that multi-purpose zoom you're hankering after; but then augment it with a 50mm ƒ/1.4 or ƒ/1.7 as your second lens for low-light use.

This advice did not instantly become Universal standard practice amongst photographers seeking a two-lens kit. :-)

I did get the Zeiss Contax combo for myself for a while. The idea was that I'd put the 45mm on the camera for everyday carrying around—for grab shots and record shots, here and there—and switch to the big 28–85mm zoom when I was shooting more purposefully or concertedly, and needed more flexibility, and didn't mind the weight. (Basically, what that comes down to is this: one lens for when the camera is mainly hanging from your shoulder, one for when the camera is mainly in your hands.) The problem was that I couldn't focus the 45mm very well on the camera I had at the time (I probably already needed a bit of diopter correction, but hadn't realized it yet), so, although I got a few really superb shots from it, it went the way of all lenses soon enough.

I have another problem with my nested zoom/prime two-lens strategy...namely, if I equip myself with a superb zoom and a good prime in the right focal length, I will use the prime exclusively and never get the zoom out of the bag. That's just me. I could easily imagine the opposite—somebody using the zoom exclusively and never getting the prime out of the bag. (More about this in a minute.)

Meanwhile, something interesting has been happening. I talked in Part I about the switch from a 50mm normal to an inexpensive standard zoom as what we now refer to as the "kit" lens, the basic lens the camera comes with. But now, the two-lens kit is becoming increasingly common—look, for instance, at these examples from Pentax, Canon, Nikon, Olympus, and Sony. I don't have access to relative sales figures to quantify their popularity, and I doubt the popularity of two-zoom kits has surpassed the popularity of one-zoom kits, but there's little doubt that two-zoom kits are becoming more and more popular. And, clearly, the reasoning of these offerings is of the get-all-the-focal-lengths-covered variety.

Another digression. When I lived in Chicago, for a while I got in the habit of ending my epic morning commute with a trip through the drive-through at the local Dunkin' Donuts shop near the office. Each morning I'd buy the same thing: large coffee with all the additives, and three "long johns," which are oblong donutoid pastries with white icing on top. I would then munch on these throughout the morning at work. When the long johns were fresh, they were good. And every Dunkin' Donuts is supposed to discard day-old donuts so that everything they sell is always fresh. (Not hard since they only cost something like 3–7¢ each to make.) But this donut shop was owned by hard-working recent Asian immigrants, newly enough arrived so that only the matriarch of the family spoke a game but broken sort of English. They obviously considered that throwing away otherwise perfectly good donuts just because they were a day old was an intolerable waste, so, about one time out of three, my morning long johns would be stale, and I'd end up throwing them away once I got to the office.

So one day, I went to the donut store on my lunch break, parked the car, and went into the shop. I traded pleasantries with the proprietress, who knew who I was from my morning visits. Then I explained to her very carefully and politely that I did not want to buy stale donuts. If they were not fresh, I didn't want them. She seemed to understand. "Okay, only fresh, okay!" she said, very cheerfully.

This went fine for a few mornings. Then, one morning, when she was handing over the bag I'd purchased, she said, "I not forget! I remember what you say! I give extra! Four! Extra!"

I thanked her, but I didn't quite know what this meant. Until I got to the office. The donuts were stale, so she'd given me four instead of three.

Okay, now how does that reasoning work? If I don't want something at all, how does more of what I don't want make it better? If I don't want it, I don't want more of it. I stopped going to the donut shop, which was probably better for my health anyway.

In any event, that's kind of how a two-zoom kit strikes me. Kit lenses aren't actually that crappy these days—they're actually surprisingly okay. But still, having two slow, large-ish and not-very-well-built lenses instead of one doesn't seem like an unmitigated improvement to me—even if you like, and prefer, zooms to begin with.

Of course, that might be because when you get right down to it, I don't really care for zooms at all. That's a minority preference, these days.

Still, here's what I think of as the perfect two-lens kit these days: this lens for concerted shooting, and this one for carrying around.

The versatility offered by this two-lens kit is of a very specific nature: not speed, not additional focal-length range...just portability. But that's what would be important to me. Put the pancake on an E-30 and you'd have a very elegant, reasonably light, eminently carryable camera without an awkward big zoom swinging around and whacking into people on elevators and getting in the way in the car. The zoom, as a complementary lens, is of ungodly high optical quality, focuses very close, and is both fast and waterproof—and covers more focal lengths than I'd personally ever need.

I don't shoot Olympus, but if I did....

With Nikon's new 35mm ƒ/1.8 you could put a decent pair together in the Nikon range for an APS-C camera, too. The 35's faster than the Olympus pancake, and wide enough. Although perhaps still not ideal.

What's ideal? Well, for me, the Panasonic 20mm ƒ/1.7 that I do own and use. You could pair that with the slower but versatile zoom of your choice—normal, long, or wide. (Assuming you could actually get any of them.)

Of course, the problem there is it assumes you're on board with Micro 4/3, which most people aren't. For better or worse, most people are tied to their system choices, which they've already made.

If I were specifying "dream" or imaginary gear,  a perfect pair in my view would be, on an APS-C camera with body-integral IS, a 19–57mm ƒ/2.8 (that's approximately a 28–85mm-e 3x zoom), and a relatively compact 25mm ƒ1.7 with a closeup converter (that's approximately 38mm-e).

Of course we don't get to have the equipment we imagine.

In any event, I seldom recommend a two-lens kit of a zoom plus a fast normal any more. The reason is purely practical—there just aren't very many good fast normal primes for digital cameras in most makers' lens lineups. It's easy to recommend a 50mm ƒ/1.7 or ƒ/1.8 as an adjunct to a zoom for a film camera, because 50mm moderate-speed normals are thick on the ground and cheap as dirt (in fact, if you recall, I gave a nice one away the other day). They cause very little pain either to procure or to carry. But for reduced-format digital cameras, fast primes of normal focal length are a headache—there aren't very many non-legacy alternatives available, and those that are tend to be expensive and not quite the right focal lengths.

And, when you get right down to it, I'm not even totally convinced any more that the "nested" zoom/prime strategy for a two-lens kit is a very workable idea, as a practical matter. For instance, I would personally use a two-lens kit of the Panasonic 20mm and the Panasonic 14–45mm on my GF1, but then I'd streamline it by, um, getting rid of the 14–45mm because I would probably never use it. I just don't care for zooms, is all. That's not a value judgment, so please don't bust my chops, please. It's just my personal preference. I admit that it's possible that there is simply a natural bifurcation between zoom users and prime users, and that people might generally tend to fall into one or the other of the two camps and don't actually much like to switch off between them. That doesn't make one or the other preference "better," but it means that a two-lens kit of one prime and one zoom might be wrong for almost everybody.

This requires more research. I'm sure I'm about to hear opinions about all this from a lot of TOP readers, and that will make a good start!

Mike

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(P.S. I've assumed that it goes without saying throughout this two-part post that a) lens choice does depend on what your aims and needs are, b) there is no inherent reason why anyone has to have only two lenses, and c) lens choice is indeed purely personal and, in fact, part of the fun of photography. I personally have never stuck to the same one or two lenses for more than about five years at the very longest, and lots of my experiments have been...ahh, a whole lot shorter than that. Sometimes, though, it can be clarifying to hear others discuss the considerations involved, and relate their own experiences.  —MJ)

Featured Comment by Julian: "I'm lucky enough to take pictures for a living, and I typically use zooms for work and primes for fun. I shoot Canon full-frame, and on assignment I lug around a 16–35mm ƒ/2.8, 70–200mm ƒ/4 and often a 24–105mm ƒ/4 or 24mm shift lens too. But when I'm just out with a camera, I will take one or all of my fast lightweight primes—28mm ƒ/1.8, 50mm ƒ/1.4, and 85mm ƒ/1.8."

Featured Comment by Glenn Brown: "The lens choice thing is very personal and dependent on your work. For my corporate work, 90% of my stuff is on the Nikkor 85mm ƒ/1.4. But if I walk out the door for fun it's a 35mm ƒ/2."

Featured Comment by John Krumm: "As an Olympus E-620 user, the two-lens kit I find quite useful for people is the 12–60mm and the 50mm ƒ/2. The 50mm ƒ/2 is great for darker events and portraits and detail work, the 12–60mm for everything else. But I still would like that little pancake."

Featured Comment by mfbernstein: "Lens design can be counterintuitive sometimes. Until recently I shot with Olympus DSLRs, and the 12–60mm you mentioned was my main lens. Still, after a while I wanted something smaller and faster for certain occasions, and tried the pancake 25mm ƒ/2.8—but I missed the better image quality and faster focusing of the zoom!"

Featured Comment by V. I. Voltz: "Whenever anyone discusses lens or camera choice, I recall running across a field in Yugoslavia, with bullets flying everywhere and the spaces between the bullets mostly filled with explosions, while trying to carry a large bag containing two Nikon N90s bodies with MB-10 grips, a 28–70 and 80–200 zoom, two Nikon SB26 speedlights, and sundry cables, accessories and 40 or so rolls of film. I made it out without a scratch, although it still comes back to me at times. After that I started using a Leica M6 with a 35mm and a 75mm lens, no matter what anyone 'insisted' I use."

Featured Comment by Adrian: "Does a Rolleiflex 3.5F count as a two-lens kit?"

Featured Comment by Georg:  "It seems to me that the perfect two-lens kit consists of two identical Zeiss ZM Sonnar 50/1.4. One of them sitting on an M9, the other one on an Olympus E-P1."

Featured Comment by Tilman Paulin: "I basically had a 'two lens kit' on my last hiking holidays. A Sigma DP2 (41mm equiv.) in my pocket and my Nikon D80 with the 18–135mm kit lens in my backpack. Only got the D80 out of the backpack when I couldn't get the shot done with the DP2 (which didn't happen too often). This worked great since it kept me from opening and closing my backpack all the time. Enjoyed my trip quite a bit and got great pictures too.... :)"

Featured Comment by Wibbeler: "For Canon newbies, I often recommend getting the 50/1.8 even though that 'overlaps' the kit. The lens is by no means the perfect prime, but it it's an inexpensive way for people to try some of the many benefits of fast apertures and higher optical quality. I consider its existence and use on Canon's entry level SLRs an important differentiation over Nikon's entry level SLRs where the similar Nikkor 50/1.8 won't autofocus."

Dear Mike,

I found your reference to Alex Garcia's opinion about using promos [last paragraph of this post  —Ed.] particularly interesting. My newspaper, The Herald News, in Fall River, Mass., currently has a branding campaign going. Originated by Publisher Sean Burke, our motto is: 'Reality. Delivered Daily.' The large house ads carry one of one of (mostly) my page one photos big, and a smaller file of the top half of that front page, along with the slogan. The back end of that campaign is a series of posters featuring Herald News employees, and a quote about their jobs at the paper. The headline for these is 'Our Reality. Delivered Daily.' The posters will replace the first set of house ads and run as a series.

At the outset of this campaign, my Editor In Chief asked if I would be a subject, and I agreed. The other photog, however, needed surgery and was out for six weeks. So, I asked my 'little' brother (he's 52), Jay Foley, to shoot me. He's an accomplished photographer and part-time pro. The poster is attached. I'm not sure it's about anything but me being old. But, after busting my chops long enough, all my colleagues admit that they like it. And no, I did not cover the Lizzie Borden trial.

Good shooting,

Jack Foley

The Herald News

(Click to see larger)

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A long long time ago, and far away—not only before digital but before the era of the point-and-shoot—the SLR ruled. If you wanted a "serious" camera in 1965 or 1970 or 1975 or 1980, you bought a 35mm SLR. If you were prosperous (or ambitious) it said "Nikon" on it, and if you were in college, you accessorized it with a wide, colorfully embroidered strap. The cameras were good ones, sturdy and versatile, and the camera dealers were happy, because your SLR purchase led quite naturally to other purchases—mainly, a flash, and more lenses. But the lens the camera came with was a 50mm. Usually it was a "slow" 50mm, meaning it had a maximum aperture setting of ƒ/2 or ƒ/1.9 or ƒ/1.8 or ƒ/1.7. A generation earlier, these had been not slow but fast: when the Leica Summicron was first introduced, it was not a slow lens. It supplanted Leica's versions of the Zeiss Tessar-types, the fastest of which was ƒ/2.8.

Then, in the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s, that situation began to change. That was the era of the ascendancy of the zoom lens—and of autofocus. Prior to roughly the mid-1980s everyone understood that zooms were for geeks, wannabes, and tyros. Innocent, airheaded amateur gearheads bought zooms. But there were a lot of them. (My first serious lens was a Konica Varifocal, an early tour-de-force of optical engineering that was also so big and heavy that it made every shot—not every shoot, every shot—a major production.) And, as more and more people bought them, zooms got better and better. It was when the Zeiss Contax 35–70mm ƒ/3.4 came along (anyone know when that was?) that I first heard the claim that a zoom was as good as the equivalent primes. (It was, too, or at least, it had its own charm—sweet lens.)

No one has really written about this (what I mean is, it is not received wisdom), but the parallel ascendancy of AF was important to the ascendancy of the zoom. Minolta was the first to implement AF widely, and rightly reaps the credit (except perhaps among blinkered Leicaphiles who feel that Leitz's dead-end experiments with Correfot somehow give it primacy here. Not. And for those who will say it was Honeywell, its part was in the technical development—I'm talking about public acceptance, in real products). But it was really Nikon—in those days indisputably #1 amongst camera manufacturers where serious 35mm photography was concerned—which tipped the scales in favor of it. When Nikon went to AF, it made AF respectable.

But I digress. What I was going to say is that zooms you had to focus yourself were inconvenient: instead of focus-and-shoot, you suddenly had to zoom, focus, and shoot. The coming of autoexposure a decade earlier had reduced the number of operations you had to make before shooting; this was a step in the other direction. The way around this inconvenience in the '70s and '80s was the so-called "one touch" (or "push-pull") zoom*, which had a broad single control ring that controlled both zooming (by moving it in and out) and focusing (by twisting it). These meant that, with practice, you could perform both functions reasonably quickly. It also meant that you couldn't set either focal length or focus on the lens and have it stay there, an early example of the camera getting in the way instead of getting out of the way. Autofocus to the rescue! With AF, all you had to do was zoom, and the camera, more or less, focused itself. AF helped make zooms tenable from an operability standpoint.  

Yet another parallel development that was important to the change was the adoption of bright viewing screens. Simple ground-glass screens were easy to focus on, but dark. Changing from an ƒ/1.7 50mm lens, say, to an ƒ/3.4 or slower zoom made the viewfinder image intolerably dim. Various parties innovated brighter screens, but there was usually a rough trade-off between ease of focus—what is sometimes called focus "snap"—and brightness. AF made it possible to use brighter screens to offset the modest maximum apertures of zooms without paying a price in focusability. With many of today's cameras, it's just not very easy to focus even fast lenses manually—even those that don't have the "tunnelvision" problem of reduced-sized digital formats.

I can't really say when it was that what we now call the "kit zoom"—then perhaps more commonly called a "normal" or "standard" zoom—replaced the 50mm (which had in the meantime transmogrified from "slow" to "fast" because it was much faster than the zoom) as the lens most cameras came with. I sort of wasn't paying attention. It happened before the digital era, though–sometime in the 1990s, I'd guess, although I can't really pinpoint it much better than that.

I'm going to digress again, if you'll pardon me. Where I live, between 95% and 98% of all automobiles sold are equipped with automatic transmissions. When asked to speculate as to why this is, most people will say it's because automatic gear changers are just as good and more convenient than manual ones. They think this conclusion is not only correct, but obvious. Nonsense, I say—I think it's because driving students aren't required to know how to drive manual transmissions, so most people aren't familiar with them. If they are familiar with them, they have an unpleasant memory of an alarming failed attempt to get a manual-transmission car started moving in first gear! I believe that in places in the world where citizens have to learn how to drive a stick shift as part of driver training, manual transmissions are more popular than they are here. (Which country has the best driver training in the world? Finland, I think? I wonder if Finns are required to know how to drive a stick shift in order to get their driver's licenses, and, if so, what the percentage of manual vs. automatic is in new-car purchases there.)

The situation is similar with regards to slow zooms and fast primes. It's quite possible to be an enthusiastic amateur photographer these days and never have used a fast single-focal-length lens. If cameras were still sold with fastish prime normals as standard kit, lots of people would still use zooms—but the percentage of people who use primes would be higher than it is, I think.

Well, now, this is already too long for a blog post, and I haven't even gotten around to my subject yet. I'll meander onward in the next post. (Hey, it's Saturday, right?) Longtime readers already know where I'm going with this, so it shouldn't be any hardship to have to wait.

Mike

*The lenticular equivalent of shag carpeting, mullet haircuts, and AMC Matadors and Javelins.

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Featured Comment by Nico Burns: "Well, here in the U.K., manual transmission cars are standard. I would say 99% of cars here are manual. The standard driving test here requires a manual car. There is a separate one for automatic cars, but then you get an automatic licence and are not allowed to drive manual cars, which would be annoying, as most cars are manual. I can't comment on which is better, as I'm not yet 17, and therefore cannot yet drive."

TOP's Man in Croatia, Editor-at-Large Vlatko Juric-Kokic, attends the Croatian press launch of the new Sony mirrorless cameras.

You really cannot go in depth about a camera if you had it in your hands for only a couple of hours, but you can tell what it is about. And Sony NEX cameras are all about consumer photography. I know that some might consider that term an oxymoron, but we are talking about the kind of photography that doesn't really care about capturing the perfect composition, that doesn't really care about technique, and even less about the intricate technical details of cameras. The people who commit consumer photography care about capturing the emotional content of their lives—the easier they can do that, the better.

Sony Alpha NEX-5

Sony is very clearly targeting just such people with NEX-3 and NEX-5. Even the presentation for journalists I attended was done like not a single one of us knows anything about cameras or photography. They talked about "creative defocusing," decreased noise, number of frames per second, the small size of the camera, the highness of its ISO and similar easily shown number-oriented features, as well as the ability to capture 3D pictures to display on Sony TV sets. In other words, typical consumer-marketing strategy, as if they were talking about a compact camera.

Buttoning up

Before you start thinking I'm seriously condemning both Sony and their new cameras, let's check how the camera operates. Note that I'm using singular: most of the journalists were handed the NEX-5. Sony positions it as the higher of the two models, but the differences are not big. The NEX-5 is slightly smaller, has magnesium alloy housing, and can capture video in 1080p resolution AVCHD. The rest is about the same. And the NEX-5 is really small, by the way. In spite of the size, it's quite comfortable to hold, due to its grip, but I would still recommend not holding it like a DSLR. On the other hand, the size meant that I accidentally pressed the menu button and dial quite often. (More often than on my Olympus Pen, which is bigger.)

Size comparison: Sony NEX-5 with 16mm pancake vs. Olympus E-P1 with OM Zuiko 28mm ƒ/2.8 via adapter. (Photo by Vlatko Juric-Kokic.)

The buttons are my main reason for irritation with the NEX cameras. They are designed like true compacts. That is, no direct fiddling with values. If you want to change the EV compensation, you have to go to the menu and then to Camera Settings. After you've done that, you have to stay with that value until you decide you want to change the EV compensation again. The same thing happens if you want to change ISO value—in that case you have to go to Brightness menu. I would say this different placing is just great for people who don't think that image parameters should be grouped together or don't care about it, but for photographers, at least, most of probably won't be welcome. Yes, I know you can adjust to the placement of the settings as well as to the work through the menus, but then, we can adjust to almost anything.

Seriously, though

In spite of the awkward way of working, NEX-5 is quite a nicely responsive little camera. Menus fairly zip by and the reviewing of captured photos goes quickly as well. Focusing also seems quite fast and the camera seems to lock on subjects properly. Provided, of course, you didn't let the camera decide where to focus, like your garden-variety compact user most probably would. Centre-point seems to be the most "serious" way of automatic focusing, but of course you have to recompose later. The only problem with the speed of the processor came after I shot an in-camera panorama or used the high-speed burst. The camera would obediently and quickly take the photos and then choke while writing them on the card. That might go better with a faster card (we had Group 4 SD cards), but given that the panorama is written only as JPEG, I'm inclined to doubt it. It takes time to process many photos.

The Slovene Miss Universe runner-up. Kit lens at 55mm, ƒ/5.6, ISO 1600.

(Photo by Vlatko Juric-Kokic.)

There is also a difference between the two lenses we could try—the 18–55mm ƒ/3.5–5.6 kit zoom and the 16mm ƒ/2.8 pancake. The kit zoom is a kit zoom. The photos taken with it look nicely sharp, although its slowness could be the main reason why more enthusiastic photographers won't warm to it.

The pancake

The pancake is yet another story. I'm not among those who think that ƒ/2.8 is a tragedy. Of course, something like ƒ/1.7 or even ƒ/2 would be more than welcome, but ƒ/2.8 is quite usable. The fact that it's wide-angle seems to be more problematic in use. Naturally, you can shoot with a wide-angle lens in lots of situations but it forces you to use a particular way of shooting. Sony recommends the use of digital zoom for those who are not familiar with wide angle lenses. One word: ewwww. Then there's typical wide-angle distortion when close to the subject which seems to be greater if the camera is in portrait orientation. On the other hand, I simply cannot decide what is the reason for softness on quite a lot of photos I took with the pancake—whether it was caused by the low shutter speed and camera shake, model movement, misfocus, the combination of any of the above...or that I say the lens is simply slightly soft wide open and be done with it. It would need more photos taken with the lens to be certain*.

A Slovene Playboy Playmate of the Month. 16mm pancake, wide open at ƒ/2.8, ISO 200. (Photo by Vlatko Juric-Kokic.)

Unlike the kit zoom, the pancake doesn't have the optical stabilisation. (And you turn the stabilisation for the zoom through the cumbersome menus.) When I asked why Sony abandoned their in-body stabilisation, I was told that it was because the stabilisation module from Alphas couldn't fit into such small bodies.

What certainly comes next is a super-zoom lens finely tuned for video work, with silent focusing. There apparently won't be an even wider lens than the pancake because Sony has already manufactured a fisheye converter for it.

A member of the Croatian National Swimming Team. 16mm pancake,

wide open at ƒ/2.8, ISO 200. (Photo by Vlatko Juric-Kokic.)

It's also certain that there will be new bodies, too. They didn't want to specify anything for the future bodies but I was told that they didn't just throw these two cameras in the market and that their engineers are already working on new models.

In the meantime, what we've got is two cameras firmly oriented towards consumers and people who want to step up from their compacts. For that part of the market the two NEX cameras seems to be very nice, but photography enthusiasts will probably have to either wait or take up with the competition.

Vlatko

*The softness of the 16mm is now a "known bug" and Sony has stated they didn't really mean it. That will give them a chance to figure out what's wrong and make it right.  —Ed.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.