Rapidly following on from the announcement that Schneider lens group has joined Micro Four Thirds, Olympus has posted an announcement that Carl Zeiss AG has joined the Micro Four Thirds standard.
Micro Four Thirds now has all of the top 3 European lens makers on board:
- Leica through the Panasonic partnership
- Carl Zeiss
- Schneider
Plus you have the Asian manufacturers either officially supporting the standard or via 3rd party AF adapters:
- Panasonic
- Olympus
- Sigma
- Voigtlander (Cosina) – Cosina also manufactures manual focus SLR lenses for Carl Zeiss with Nikon (ZF), Pentax (ZK), Canon EOS (ZE), and M42 screw mounts (ZS).
- Canon EF and EF-S via the Birger Engineering AF adapter – and yes, that means you could in theory use the newly announced Canon EF 200-400mm f/4 IS L with 1.4x telextender on your Panasonic GH-1 or GH-2 and not only gain AF, aperture control and optical IS, but get telephoto reach of a 400-800mm f/4 lens with switchable option of 1.4x mode to give reach of a 560-1120mm f/5.6 – of course you would need to mount the lens on a nice sturdy tripod, but it would add a nice extra option to its use on a Canon 1D Mark IV or a Canon 1Ds Mark III.
And if that is not enough, you can adapt almost any other lens ever made in manual focus and stop down aperture mode via the appropriate adapter.