Sony TidBits (Some products discontinued?)

April 19, 2011
rumors
4 Comments

NAB 2011: Zeiss CP.2 E-mount adapters

Holding a candle to the Sony PMW-F3 (Abelcine)

Sony NEX Viewfinder with Magnifier (SonyAlphaNex)

I received quite a few messages about possible discontinued products:
Paul: “IF you look on the canadian sony style site, the A390 and all of the 500 series have been pulled. The only remaining DSLR cameras are the sony 850 and the 900.“. Answer: I checked SonyStyle USA and some other european Sonystyle websites and they did not pull the A390 and 500 series. So it might be a temporary issue on Sonystyle Canada.
Xxx: “Hi, I just ordered an A850 from Crutchfield. I went back to the site to check on my order status. To my surprise, the A850 is now listed as DISCONTINUED. Can you please post on the production status of the A850.” My Answer: Sources already told me the A850 would be disocntinued but Sonysyle and other big stores do still have it in Stock!
Kevin: “I have noticed that the Zeiss primes (85mm and 135mm) with screw drives are appearing out of stock at places like SonyStyle.com. Could this mean updated versions with HSM are on the way? Might want to quiz some of your sources and see if there be anything to it or just a shortage due to the quake and tsunami.” Answer: No.

A reader sent me also this: “Here is that 3CMOS 3D Digital SLR that you were talking about previously: http://pro.sony.com/bbsccms/ext/BroadcastandBusiness/minisites/NAB2011/files/pmwtd300_v2501.pdf. Note it is not a digital camera but a video camera. It is a 3D video camera with 6 sensors and two lenses.”

And another reader sent me the explanation of the lens patent we talked about last week: “Not really smart, this is the lens is already used on the [shoplink 6491]SONY DSC-HX100V (Click here to see that camera)[/shoplink]. It has A 30X range (27-810. The patent talks about the difficulty of correcting lens aberrations while maintaining proper illumination at the sensor edges (exit pupil angle) with mega zoom lenses (over 10x). Some lens element groups are used to fix certain aberration but can make other aberrations worse. This lens uses a 5th group to help correct such aberrations and provide good performance.”