The Zeiss ZX1 seems to be finally going up for sale. The Android-powered camera recently showed up for pre-order on B&H, although it later changed to 'Notify When Available' at the time of writing. The Zeiss ZX1 was initially announced two years ago in September 2018, with the launch being planned in early 2019. That clearly did not come to fruition and for a while the camera was seemingly forgotten until it suddenly showed up on B&H.
The Zeiss ZX1 is a compact
mirrorless camera with a fixed lens. It has a full-frame 37.4MP CMOS sensor
with a sensitivity of ISO 80-51200 and capable of 4K30 video recording and 3fps
burst capture. The sensor is matched with a Zeiss Distagon T* 35mm f2 fixed
lens.
The camera also has a leaf
shutter design, 255-point AF system, physical shutter speed and ISO dials,
0.7-inch 1080p OLED viewfinder and 4.3-inch 720p LCD touchscreen. There are
also headphone and microphone jacks, along with a top hot shoe. The ZX1 is
designed around being able to capture, edit, and share images, right from the
camera. The camera integrates Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC within its editing
interface, so users can quickly edit the images on the fly. After that, they
can also instantly upload the images using the built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and
NFC. Or you can store those images on the built-in 512GB flash storage.
The Android part of this
equation is fairly lowkey. So lowkey, in fact, that Zeiss doesn't even really
talk about it anywhere. This is a heavily customized version of Android, so it's
not exactly what we saw with the Samsung Galaxy Camera back in the day, where
it was just a smartphone with a camera attached on the back.
Considering this is
Zeiss-branded, the steep US$ 6000 price tag is perhaps not too surprising. The
image quality should still be very good even if it probably isn't US$ 6000 good.
However, what remains to be seen how that 2018 Android-based software and
hardware fare in late 2020, assuming there haven't been any changes since it
was first announced.