Canon released its quarterly financial results yesterday, and things aren’t looking so rosy based on Q3 2012. Revenue has fallen 13% to $10.3 billion from the same period last year, and profit dropped 42% to $908 million.
Read more…
DxOMark has just published its findings on the quality of Nikon’s new mirrorless camera sensor, and the verdict is that Nikon did a pretty good job milking quality out of the small 1-inch sensor:
With regard to its size, this ranking is a big surprise, as the Nikon J1 sensor manages to score close to or even better than larger sensors (including 4/3 sensors).
[...] On the other hand, its low-light ISO score is a bit low: 372, which reflects the impact of the sensor size. Indeed, this score is naturally dependent on the sensor size: the bigger the sensor, the more light it captures. So even though the quality of the pixels provided by Nikon is very close to that of its main competitor, its sensor size physically limits the image quality.
If low-light shooting is your thing. then you might want to look into cameras with larger sensors. However, for everyday photography the new Nikon line perform surprisingly well given how much smaller its sensor is compared to its competitors.
Turns out turning photographs into stencils isn’t transformative enough to be defended as “fair use”. In a case that has many similarities to the Shepard Fairey vs. AP legal battle, a judge ruled earlier this week against graffiti artist Thierry Guetta after Guetta (AKA Mr. Brainwash) had used a “stencil-ized” photo of Run DMC by Glen E. Friedman to promote an exhibition, concluding that Guetta’s piece didn’t differ enough from the original image to be considered fair use.
What are your thoughts on this issue? How much does a photograph need to be transformed before it is considered a new piece of art?
(via Boing Boing)
Image credits: Photograph of Run DMC by Glen E. Friedman
Turns out Fujifilm’s new FinePix X100 isn’t just nice to look at — DxOMark just published results from testing the camera’s APS-C sensor, finding that it delivered better results in all aspects compared to the best Micro Four Thirds camera sensors (namely the Olympus PEN EP2 and Panasonic Lumix DMC GH2) and rivals the quality of the best APS-C sensors found in DSLR and SLT cameras. Now if only the camera would start becoming available here in the US…
This past week we ran a poll asking our readers what operating system they mainly use. Here are the results:
[poll id="37"]
481 votes were for a Windows OS compared to 606 for a Mac OS. This means roughly 49% of our readers who decided to vote use Macs, while 39% use some form of Windows.
Assuming that most people who took the time to vote in our poll are fairly serious about photography (we’re a photography blog, after all), we can say this poll is a glimpse at operating system choices among photographers.
Now lets take a look at what Google Analytics tell us about the OS breakdown of our visitors:
This takes into account all of our visitors, regardless of whether or not they vote. Since this includes loyal readers as well as people who simply pass by, the average interest in photography is probably much less than those who chose to vote. Windows leads 66% to Mac’s 29%.
However, this still shows that our readers are, on average, quite different from the general population. Here’s the breakdown of OS use among the general Internet population:
Thus, Mac jumps from having a 5.9% market share in the general population to 49% among photographers. If we were a blog read only by professional photographers, I’d expect the percentage to be even higher.
Any thoughts on these statistics?
Image credit: Kick Boxing… by claudiogennari
A big thank you to everyone who entered our latest giveaway. The winner of the free QuikPod handheld tripod is:
Congratulations! I hope you enjoy your new accessory and put it to good use! Please send an email to editor@petapixel.com to claim your QuikPod.
We have many more giveaways planned, so please check back soon. Also, I’m definitely looking forward to Monday, when we’ll be hearing from David Nightingale of chromasia!
Have a great weekend!
The first PetaPixel giveaway has come to an end, and I’m definitely surprised by how many entries we received. We received 101 comment entries, and 76 entries through Twitter. To choose the winners, I used random.org to generate a random number between 1 and 177. Numbers 1-101 were comment entries, and 102-177 were Twitter entries.
Here are the winners:
#102: Frank DelValle (@frankdelvalle)
Canon EOS 1D Mark III
#84: Diana Pink (iamdianthus.com)
While I love my D80 with the 18-50mm 2.8 lens, it will never replace the 1970′s Minolta with 35mm lens I learned with.
#141: Chris Scott (@nzcjs):
Just starting HDR, see http://tinyurl.com/nhl4yg Favourite camera would have to be my Nikon D300. Do I win now ;-)
#140: Jon Krombein (@Krombein)
my favorite camera is the Canon 1Ds Mk3.
#79: Dustin Dodge (dustindodgephotography.com)
Camera: Canon 5D
Lens: 24-70mm 2.8L
#123: Donnita Mae (@DonnitaMae)
My favorite lens in the Canon 70-200 f2.8 IS.
#34: Robin (aroundtheisland.blogspot.com)
My only SLR is my Nikon D40 so I’ll go with that. It’s either that or the older than ancient Yashica I had as a teen many (far too many) years ago.
Congratulations to all the winners! Please send an email to editor@petapixel.com to claim your HDR PhotoStudio license.
If you didn’t win, don’t fret. I have some more giveaways planned for the near future, including more HDR software licenses!
Now, some interesting things I discovered through laboriously tabulating the entries by hand:
The most popular cameras were the Canon 5D Mark II with 12 entries, and the Nikon D90 with 10 entries.
The most popular lenses were the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS with 8 entries, and the Nikon 50mm f/1.8D with 4 entries.
You can download the final tally here, though I’m not sure why you’d want to.
Thanks again to everyone who participated in this first giveaway. I definitely had a lot of fun reading through everyone’s favorite cameras and lenses, and am definitely looking forward to the next giveaway.
P.S. PetaPixel just broke the 1,000th follower mark on Twitter (@petapixel). Thanks everyone!
