Birger Engineering have announced that their new Canon EOS/EF adapter for the Panasonic AF100 Micro Four Thirds camcorder will also work fully on the Micro Four Thirds cameras with larger power supplies such as the Panasonic GH-1 and Panasonic GH-2.
Birger state that it will be available from 14th Feb 2011 and price will be $US700.
This means that those like me who own nice Canon L lenses can also use them on their GH-1 with full aperture control, auto-focus and optical image stabilisation – all powered via the Micro Four Thirds mount pins.
Now that is very cool – of course, you will still be using them at 2x crop factor, but it will value add to users of both systems substantially!
Of course, don’t expect such an adapter to be cheap, and I suspect the autofocus will not be fast as these Canon lenses are not optimised for contrast detect AF, but every little bit helps, and having aperture control at last will be a real boon!
Just imagine using a Canon 50mm f/1.2 L lens – at 100mm equivalent focal length in 35mm terms, this would make a great portrait lens on a GH-1 or GH-2!
Or perhaps, you are into nature photography and the Canon 100mm f/2.8 L IS macro lens would be heaven – and you get the benefits of optical image stabilisation!
Or even the Canon 300mm f/4L IS to give hand held, image stabilised telephoto reach of a 600mm lens yet at f/4 aperture for fast shutter speeds – fantastic for slow moving subjects or where you can pre-focus.
Already, the Canon 90mm tilt shift lens being manual focus is a much easier lens to use on mirrorless cameras such as Micro Four Thirds as manual focus on a tilted image plane is best done in magnified live view which is quite cumbersome on a dSLR, but now we will also gain aperture control – just brilliant!
Now, I wonder if face recognition AF will work with these lenses as some of these lenses have very shallow depth of field and on a dSLR, it can be quite difficult to keep the focus on the face when the face is not in the centre of the image, or on your selected AF point.
Hopefully, the Panasonic flash TTL exposures will work as the camera should now have the aperture value – the GH-1 did not expose TTL flash well at all when used with legacy lenses where the camera could not determine the aperture.
See the announcement here on eoshd.com.
