Dante Stella... wow,
there's a name out of the past for me!
This looks like a very promising product. NP-FW50 was an excellent choice of battery. This will be a great way to score Sony users.
Questions for Pixii:
You can email Pixii via their website and they probably will email you back -- and your correspondent is as likely to be designer and CEO David Barth as anybody -- but I will take a crack at some of these questions too:
- Why no framelines for a ~35mm equivalent lens (like a 25 CV or ZM)? If the widest frame line is 28mm, that's like 42mm. Or am I reading that spec wrong and it's 28, 35, 40mm equivalents?
No "equivalency" shenanigans here. If you select the "28mm" setting (which has to be done via menu or phone app, btw -- no auto-changing framelines as on Leica M) the camera brings up a set of framelines that display what a lens with an actual focal length of 28mm will show
on the Pixii. Same with 35, 40 and 50. If you remember how the Epson R-D1 finder worked, it's exactly the same: set a focal length and the camera shows framelines indicating what the lens will cover
on that camera.
With a 28mm focal length on the Pixii's Super 35/APS-C sensor, the lens will cover an angle of 48 degrees along the long side of the frame. That's the same angular coverage as a 20mm lens on a Micro 4/3 camera, a 40mm lens on a
Moses-format camera, or a 50mm lens on a 44x33mm-sensor medium format camera.
Why didn't they go any wider? I'm guessing here, but the Pixii's finder magnification is already a usable-but-low-ish 0.67x. If they had wanted to squeeze in another frameline outside of 28mm, they'd either have had to drop the finder magnification even further (bad for RF accuracy) or make the whole range/viewfinder assembly larger (undesirable from a convenience and cost perspective.) At least on the Pixii you can actually
see the 28mm frameline, which for me was always a bit of a challenge on the R-D 1!
- What's going on with the lack of flash sync?
There is
no mechanical shutter -- zip, zero -- so there is nothing to which to sync a flash. I know, Nikon can do flash sync on its shutterless Z9 camera, but that camera uses a brand-new and very expensive stacked sensor, and whatever Sigma calls their shutterless camera can do flash sync, but only at very low shutter speeds (1/15?)
Actually, the Pixii probably
could do flash sync within certain limitations. I was curious about this before I bought the Pixii, so I experimented using my Fujifilm X-T 4 in electronic-shutter mode (since it has the same sensor size and, so I'm told, similar readout speed.) Fujifilm completely disables flash sync in ES mode, but by using a variety of workarounds and a digital delay timer, I was able to get it to sync fairly reliably at 1/125!
If you want the authoritative word, here's what it says on this subject in an email I got from David Barth:
"Flash: there is no flash function. It may be proposed as a future upgrade, starting problably with a software upgrade for studio photographer using wireless solutions compatible with our Bluetooth subsystems. There is little priority for a hot shoe / TTL feature considering the rangefinder nature of the camera."
Questions for Ranger9:
- How wide is the "throat" of the camera - can it take collapsible or protruding wides?
I haven't tried anything that protrudes more than the Sonnar-formula 7Artisans 35mm f/2, but had no problems. Because there's no mechanical shutter, there's no need for curtain-roller housings etc.; basically there's nothing inside the throat except the sensor itself.
But again, here's the official word from David Barth in an email:
"Our design is in fact more compatible because we handle collapsible Elmars and Summicrons, while Leica says to not do it because they left less margin and you risk scratching the shutter blades. We specifically designed the camera housing to accommodate these old ladies. And the Hologon as well."
- How does it do with symmetrical wides?
I don't know. The widest rangefinder lens I own is a 28mm.
I guess longer term, the questions this triggers are:
- How long is it going to be before an iOS update bricks the phone app? Those of us with DxO Ones live in dread of things like that (as well as eliminating lighting ports...)
Actually -- and this is something a lot of the online coverage gets wrong -- it's kind of a moot point, because
you don't actually need the phone app at all to use the camera. It's just a convenience if you want to review shots after taking, or change camera settings remotely rather than via the on-camera menu.
Currently there are some security-related quirks with iOS 15.2 that forced Pixii to disable one app function (the ability to connect to the camera's self-created wireless access point) but Pixii says they expect to return that function as soon as they sort out Apple's issue.
Also, there's an Android version of the app -- still listed as beta, but people seem to be using it successfully -- so you're not locked into iOS.
- How complicated is it to change the internal battery?
There isn't one! That IS one of the things I find a bit off-putting about the Pixii: When powered off, it retains some of your menu settings (presumably in NVRAM) but does NOT maintain date and time settings. If you do a quick handshake with the app at startup time, it will pick up the date and time from your phone and remember it until powered off again. But if you don't, your photos' EXIF data will show a creation date of 1/1/00 at 12:00:00 am plus however long the camera has been powered on. It's not hard to fix this using Lightroom's bulk-change feature, but it's a bit janky. Still, I'd rather put up with that than with an internal battery that eventually would die and might leak.
- Wifi N is a little on the old side. I already have routers that won't talk to B and G already. Not saying it needs to be AX, but AC would be a little more current
Yeah, but remember that with the Pixii, most of what constitutes the "camera" is completely software-defined. There's no reason they couldn't update it to any protocol that's supported by the ARM Cortex main processor.
Hope this helps, or at least is of interest! I'm trying NOT to be too much of a Pixii fanboy on this thread -- I'll readily admit, for example, that someone who has a big collection of M-mount lenses (really fat ones won't work on the Pixii) or uses flash even occasionally would be better off with a Leica M. But especially now that I've been using it almost every day, I've gotten to the point that I don't even notice most of the quirks that seemed super-weird to me at first. I just pick it up and shoot with it and it stays out of my way, and that's how I like to work.
