Announced at NAB 2012, Canon is starting to ship their lightweight cinema zooms, with the first being the CN-E 30-105 T2.8. Featuring an 11-blade iris, a close focus of just 24 inches, and a low weight of 4.85 pounds, the lens is available in both PL or Canon EF mounts.

Bokeh is one of the more misunderstood concepts in optics. The term was coined for photographic use in 1997, from the Japanese word boke, meaning blur or haze. In recent years, "bokeh" has been simplified to refer to how the shape of a lens' iris is rendered in out-of-focus points of light in an image, such as streetlamps at night. Much is made of how many iris blades are used in a lens and how round the iris aperture is as it is stopped down, but these are only minor aspects of bokeh.

A great deal of interest was generated at NAB by the announcement of the Blackmagic Cinema Camera, a 2.5k-capable (2432x1366) camera that records directly to SSDs. Recording 2.5k content as CinemaDNGs or 1080 HD content as ProRes or DNxHD, the Cinema Camera certainly offers some unique possibilities at an affordable price point. In this article, we present the various accessories and lens options that can be used with the camera.

Sony's new NEX-FS700 camera builds upon the success of the NEX-FS100, but adds some much-requested features and a few surprises as well.The feature set is very similar to the FS100, so most lenses and accessories will be fully compatible between the two. In this article, we present the various accessories and lens options that can be used with the camera.

Canon supplied one of the first production CN-E 30-300 Cinema Zooms for AbelCine's optical technicians to evaluate. We put the lens through our usual battery of tests, and we were very impressed. The 30-300 has excellent contrast and sharpness, with very low flaring and high corner-to-corner resolution and brightness.

Fujifilm's Optical Devices Division today announced their latest entry into the 35PL lens market, the Fujinon 19-90 T2.9 Cabrio zoom lens. The name Cabrio is a reference to small convertible sports cars, aka Cabriolets. The lens is both physically compact, at less than nine inches in length, and a feather-weight, at less than six pounds, making it the longest focal range handheld lens available. But the Cabrio allusion also extends to the included removable handgrip/zoom rocker servo.

Last year in our booth at NAB, AbelCine showed a prototype of the new Canon CN-E 14.5-60 T2.6 Cinema Zoom lens. We were very impressed at the time, and in recent private testing, were even more pleased. Now that the release version is shipping, AbelCine's optical technicians have put this new PL-mount zoom through a battery of evaluations, and we are very excited by the results.

Canon's much anticipated EOS C300 is a modular Super-35 sized sensor camera available in both PL and EOS (EF) mount. The modular nature and size of the C300 means the camera can live in many configurations - from the fully decked out studio camera to a light-weight run-&-gun setup.

It's been another exciting year in our industry, with lots of evolutionary and revolutionary changes. Many of the trends we've seen coming for the past several years came to fruition in 2011, leaving some to wonder what comes next. Let's take a look back and see if it can help inform us a bit on what's to come in 2012.