Pancake G lens from Sony

[alien]

Would this be any good for UW photography?
What is meant by a G lens?

sonyalpharumors | Blog | (SR5) Hot! the new G lens zoom is a pancake!!!

 

[PHIL RUDIN]

First the pictured lens is from Panasonic and for M43 camera use, as such

I have used this Panasonic lens out of the water and it has much better image quality that the 14-42 kit lens from Panasonic. The "G" is for "good'er" quality and higher price I guess. As an underwater lens the problem is the auto zoom on the lens. Because the lens is so small it has no manual zoom ring and it can not be zoomed by pushing a button on the camera body. As a result an new dome port would need to be designed with a buttom or lever to allow the zoom button on the lens to be accessed. With other new high quality lenses like the Panasonic 12-35mm X zoom which has a zoom ring and will likely fit current ports I am not sure designing a port for one lens would be an upside for ZEN Underwater, Nauticam and others.

The unreleased and unannounced Sony 16-50 F/3.5-5.6 G lens is the first of the Sony branded lenses which is rumored to have image quality in the high end range. The only high quality lens for NEX at this time is the Sony/Zeiss 24mm F/1.8. It is hard for me to think that Sony's idea of a "high quality" lens would be as slow (F/3.5-5.6 or so) as the 14-42mm "KIT" lens. The price compaired to the Panasonic 12-35 zoom ($1300.00) may to nice but a lens that slow is hard to think of as high quality.

Phil Rudin

 

[alien]

Thanks again Phil for a very thorough answer. You should come down to Oz and run photography classes.