Zeiss Announces New Camera & Lens

2018.09.28

Zeiss announced a new addition to their Batis line of lenses made for Sony E-mount mirrorless cameras. The new Batis 40mm F/2 CF is a lightweight prime lens designed for high optical performance. Although rather sizable to achieve a bright F/2 lens without compromise, this 40mm prime weighs merely 361g while being fully weatherproof.

This latest Zeiss lens gets the CF label for close focusing, achieving 0.3X magnification when it focuses closest at 24cm from the focal-plane. Like previous Batis lenses, this is an AF lens and supports Quick-Shift AF. It has an eInk display that shows the focusing distance.

The Zeiss Batis 40mm F/2 CF is scheduled to ship in the middle of November for $1300 USD. Adorama is ready to accept pre-orders.

It was quite a surprise to see Zeiss also announce a fixed lens digital camera at Photokina 2018! The new and completely unique Zeiss ZX1 is built around a 37 megapixels Full-Frame CMOS sensor paired with a 35mm F/2 prime lens. This camera features the sharpest and largest EVF ever made, a 0.7" unit with a whopping 5.7 megapixels and 0.74X magnification. The rear LCD is also the largest on the market at 4.3" and 920K pixels.

Despite being a high-end camera, the ZX1 does not offer a memory card slot. Instead it relies on 512GB of internal memory which is sufficient for thousands of 42 MB RAW files and significantly more JPEGs. The new concept is that the cameras is nearly entirely driven by touchscreen and images are edited and shared from within via WiFi and Bluetooth 4.1 LE. There is even a version Adobe Photoshop CC built right into the camera to allow image manipulation on-camera.

Pricing and availability has not been announced yet.

• Digital Camera
• Lens