FULL-FRAME COMPACT CAMERA FROM ZEISS
Zeiss sprung a surprise announcement towards the end of Photokina
Just as many journalists were heading home from Photokina, Zeiss sprung the surprise announcement of the ZX1, a full-frame compact camera with a 35mm f/2.0 Zeiss Distagon lens.
Developed in partnership with Leica, the ZX1 has a 37.4Mp CMOS sensor with a sensitivity range of ISO 80-51200. There’s also a 0.7-inch, 2,073,600-dot OLED electronic viewfinder built in along with a 4.3-inch, 921,600-dot touch screen. Dedicated dials are on hand to control aperture, shutter speed and sensitivity, plus there’s a contrast-detection autofocus system. Images of up to 7488 x 4992 pixels can be saved as JPEGs of DNG raw files, while 4K (3840 x 2160) video can be recorded at up to 30fps in MP4 format.
Perhaps the biggest surprise, however, is that Adobe Lightroom is integrated into the camera and the software can be used to edit images on the touch screen. Furthermore, there’s no memory card slot; instead the ZX1 has 512GB of SSD storage built in, with a USB-C connection and Wi-Fi connectivity being available for image transfer.