Nilay Patel
Here’s a Super 8 camera flying around on a drone.
Perfect.
Cameras
Digital cameras changed photography, and now smartphones are changing digital cameras. There’s never been more interesting ways to take a picture or record a video, and there’s also never been more ways to view those images. We’re focused on finding the most interesting innovations happening in all parts of photography.
Antonio G. Di Benedetto
These adapters use optics to make modern lenses look vintage.
Moment and new company Module 8 are announcing a line of soft-focus lens adapters called The Tuner. The line adapts EF lenses to Canon and Sony mirrorless, with an internal optic that dials in aberrations for vintage looks like classic (and ultra-expensive) cine lenses — all while maintaining autofocus.
Niche? Certainly. Kinda cool, though? Definitely. The adapters are launching on Kickstarter today for $1,999 each, with late-August estimated shipping.
Dan Seifert
Ten years ago Samsung announced the most interesting mirrorless camera ever.
The Samsung Galaxy NX was an interchangeable lens mirrorless camera with a whole-ass Android phone grafted onto the back of it. That meant you could take pictures with a large sensor and various lenses, and then edit and share them right from the camera itself.
It was a very compelling idea that sadly did not last — Samsung bowed out of the camera industry entirely a mere four years later, despite racking up a list of innovations in the space. The NX is virtually useless now since its software was abandoned by Samsung.
Still, I enjoyed this lookback on the Galaxy NX from the snappiness YouTube channel and was reminded of when I had an NX review sample that I really didn’t want to send back.
Allison Johnson
Antonio G. Di Benedetto
Never do the math on a Leica camera.
Leica’s new M11 Monochrom is a lovely camera, and an absolute joy to shoot with. But as much as I cherish its stubborn loyalty to black-and-white photography, here’s a sobering fact: If you paid me $10 for each of the 909 pictures I shot with it, I’d still need another $105 to buy one.
Antonio G. Di Benedetto
Antonio G. Di Benedetto
I’m sorry, WHO is making a black-and-white-only digital camera?
Pentax! I can’t believe it, but Ricoh Imaging is announcing the Pentax K-3 Mark III Monochrome — a new DSLR camera that shoots only black-and-white images for $2,199.95, available in late April. It’s taking a page out of Leica’s book, but with a 25-megapixel DSL-friggin-R. It makes so little sense I just might love it.
Vjeran Pavic
DPReview’s archives live on!
Some good news to end your week with. In an update to its readers, Digital Photography Review’s general manager Scott Everett confirms the site’s content will remain online after the site shuts down on April 10th.
Glad to see nearly 25 years of work not going to waste, but I’ll still miss checking DPReview scores for all the upcoming cameras.
Antonio G. Di Benedetto
Some weekend reading for my fellow camera nerds.
We’re still bummed DPReview.com is closing, but damn they’re using this time for some excellent retrospectives.
Richard Butler re-tested the first camera the site ever reviewed, a Canon PowerShot Pro70 that even had That Good Canon Color 25 years ago. And they brought back Barney Britton for a long, long, long-term review of the Nikon D3S he still owns — long live that legend of a camera.
Image: DPReview.com
Antonio G. Di Benedetto
🎶M-I-C-K-E-Y! 🎶L-E-I-C-A! Wait... what?
Leica Camera and Disney are making a Mickey Mouse-themed limited edition camera. The Leica Q2 “100 Years of Wonder” is decorated with early Mickey sketches on its front and top. There will be 500 of these, costing $5,995 (a $200 premium over the standard Q2).
Are you as confused as I am? I’m sure the rumors of a Leica Q3 coming later this year are completely unrelated.
Becca Farsace
Becca <3 CineVlog.
Are a cinemascope aspect ratio and color profile really all Sony’s new $2,199 ZV-E1 full-frame camera has over an iPhone 14 Pro? I spend a week with it to find out.
Antonio G. Di Benedetto
Jacob Kastrenakes
Glass Onion’s film grain had to be changed for streaming.
The movie’s cinematographer, Steve Yedlin, told Vulture that there are actually two versions of the film: a grainier version for theaters and a toned down version for Netflix.
The grain was making the image look crummy. You could see really big compression blocks and swimmy stuff. There are actually different settings that would’ve made the grain in the theatrical version of Glass Onion look fine, but Netflix can’t change their settings just to make one show or movie look better.
Turns out, Netflix has a special system just for streaming film grain.
Why Does Poker Face Look So Good?
[Vulture]
Chris Welch
DPReview’s YouTube hosts already have a new home.
There’s no denying that the loss of DPReview is a major blow for the photography world. Bad move, Amazon. The site has been a tremendous resource with substantive reviews, great tools for comparing cameras, and a vibrant forum community.
But there is at least a bit of good news coming out of this: Chris Niccolls and Jordan Drake, the faces of DPReview’s YouTube channel, are moving over to PetaPixel in May. Like some of you, I’ve been watching these two for years and am glad they’ll get to keep doing what they do so well.
We’ve been getting fooled by photos of the night sky for years; now, tech is making it even easier.
Emma Roth
Samsung’s faked Moon photos are a small step for smartphone photography — not a giant leap.
Allison Johnson
Antonio G. Di Benedetto
Emma Roth
Putting Samsung’s “fake” moon photos to the test.
After a Redditor discovered that Samsung’s 100x “space zoom” feature may rely heavily on AI to spit out super crisp photos of the moon, YouTuber Marques Brownlee recreated the experiment with a Galaxy S23 Ultra.
His findings? Quite a bit less dramatic than what we saw on Reddit. The resulting moon photo seems equally as blurry as the original — save for some added brightness and sharpness — and doesn’t appear to add any details that weren’t there before.
James Vincent and Jon Porter
Shooting with the Vivo X90 Pro and Samsung S23 Ultra for a week taught me that bigger sensors aren’t always better.
Allison Johnson
Sean Hollister
Today I learned a one-inch camera sensor isn’t one inch — not even diagonally.
Even if you measure it like a TV, it’s just over half an inch. Misleading much? In fact, you’d need an APS-C or larger sensor to stretch to an inch diagonally — and only full-frame and medium format sensors are more than an inch wide.
Making sensor sizes less misleading
[DPReview]
Thomas Ricker
Investigating the camcorders of the NBA.
When the NBA’s Pascal Siakam was seen filming the All-Star Weekend with a series of retro camcorders, my camera-obsessed former colleague Sam Byford decided to figure out the models and document his findings in his Multicore newsletter. There’s something wonderful about this Hi8 Sony Handycam clip of Mac McClung winning the dunk contest, captured by a product of its time by an athlete about the same age.
Emma Roth
Here’s why those video game-like football shots look so crisp.
As Cleo Abram points out, the person behind the camera’s using a creative effect, called bokeh, that blurs the background and puts the football player in focus. This creates super lifelike shots that we’ll probably see during tonight’s big game.
Jess Weatherbed
AI art studio proves its work is worth at least a gift card.
The studio won a $100 gift voucher given to first-place entries of Australian retailer DigiDirect’s weekly photo contest (seen via PetaPixel), and admitted the image was Ai-generated after the fact. No word on what it’ll spend the voucher on. Perhaps a camera?
Umar Shakir
GoPro users love paying for subscriptions.
2.25 million users to be exact. GoPro announced the new record paid subscriber count during its holiday quarter earnings report. The company had just surpassed 2 million subscriptions in Q3 2022, and now it’s capping off the year with a 52 percent annual growth in services. Annual revenue, however, is down 6 percent to $1.1 billion.
It’s no surprise to us, really. The Verge video crew loves using GoPro’s $50 per year subscription, too.
You can get a great 1080p webcam for under $75. If you want to spend more, you can get 4K recording, AI head tracking, and even a real gimbal.
Cameron Faulkner
Antonio G. Di Benedetto
Becca Farsace
Jess Weatherbed
Finally, a use for your old save icons that isn’t a coaster.
In a YouTube video, French photographer Mathieu Stern explains how he used an old floppy disk as an infrared filter for his Sony a7 II mirrorless camera (seen via PetaPixel).
“To be honest, I was not sure this hack will work, so when I saw the first image on my camera screen I was very impressed.”
Jacob Kastrenakes
Shooting film is getting even pricier.
PetaPixel reports that Kodak prices could rise up to 40 percent in the near future. This is after years of spiking costs and dwindling supply. In a chart last year, Fstoppers showed how prices have ballooned, with a roll of Kodak Gold jumping from around $4 to over $10.
As someone who just wants to shoot the cheap stuff, even the cheap stuff is getting a little too rich for me.
