Mirrorless Camera News

The new Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II is designed to hold up to inclement weather and boy did we put it to the test! During a press trip to Iceland last week, we adhered to the mailman’s creed while using Olympus’ new flagship mirrorless camera, shooting with it in rain, hail, sleet, snow and gloom of night (along with some sunshine) in this rugged but beautiful Nordic island country.

Shutterbug was on hand at the PhotoPlus Expo show, which wrapped up in New York City wrapped up yesterday, where we got to touch, try and test out some of the hottest new photo gear out there.

Not one to shy away from special-edition models, Leica recently introduced the M-P “Grip,” a $15,000 “irresistible work of art” designed in collaboration with Rolf Sachs that’s essentially a Leica-MP mirrorless digital camera (with a very nice Leica Summilux-M 35mm f/1.4 ASPH lens). But if you can’t afford this masterpiece because you’re bidding on the Ansel Adams Arca Swiss 4x5 that’s up for auction, there’s always this silver metallic Leica M3 candy-tin replica (above right) for $40.

Arguably, the biggest camera news at this year’s photokina show in Cologne, Germany was the announcement of the new Fujifilm GFX, a medium format mirrorless camera, which was unveiled to much fanfare on Monday. Shutterbug was one of a handful of media outlets to get our hands on a prototype of the 51.4-megapixel GFX and try it out for about half an hour in a conference room at the show.

The big news from Olympus this morning was the introduction of their new flagship mirrorless camera, the OM-D EM-1 Mark II. But the company had more in store with the launch of the compact Pen E-PL8 mirrorless camera and three new lenses.

Panasonic announced today that it’s developing the new Lumix GH5 mirrorless camera, which will be capable of recording smooth, high-precision 4K 60p/50p and faithful 4:2:2 10-bit 4K video “for the first time in the world.” The Panasonic Lumix GH5 will also features “6K PHOTO,” which extracts approximately 18-megapixel still images from ultra-high-quality video with approximately nine times the pixel count of Full-HD. 

After appearing at times like it might bow out of the mirrorless camera market, Canon reaffirmed its commitment to the category tonight with the introduction of the new, top-of-the-line EOS M5. While the Canon M5 might resemble a DSLR, this compact interchangeable lens mirrorless camera is smaller and lighter than even Canon’s tiny SL1 DSLR, the company said.