Earlier this month, Canon announced that there’s a firmware update for the Canon EOS M on the way that will boost the mirrorless camera’s sluggish autofocusing speeds by up to 2.3x. Given that AF slowness is one of the biggest gripes EOS M owners have with the camera, the news was likely music to many a EO M owner’s ear.
If you want to see what this 2.3x looks like in real life, Korean photographer Daero Lee has published a number of comparison videos showing updated and non-updated EOS Ms focusing on things. Read more…
Underwater photo gear company Backscatter has released a new product that’s designed to give photographers peace of mind when diving with expensive camera gear in waterproof housings. Called the AirLock Vacuum System, it’s a new device that lets you verify that your housing is completely free of leaks before you take it into the water. Read more…
When Fujifilm announced its latest wave of X-Series cameras earlier this year, the company stated that the big area they’re focusing on is “speed”. The new X20 and X100s feature extremely speedy autofocus, burst speed, and startup time. The ‘s’ in X100s may officially stand for “speed,” but it could just as well stand for “silent” or “stealth”. Both cameras feature extremely silent shutters that won’t attract attention while you’re snapping away.
The video above by nycphotog2006 shows how silent the X20 is even while the leaf shutter is fluttering at a staggering 12fps. Read more…
If you shoot film and aren’t much into chemicals (or don’t have a basement in which to keep a gigantic 5×7″ enlarger), you’ll soon find yourself needing a way to import those beautiful pictures you’ve taken onto your computer. What? Why didn’t I say, “you’ll need a scanner”? After all, it’s not 1987 anymore — scanners are as common as toaster ovens.
Well, I didn’t say “a scanner” because it’s not the only way you can digitalize those pictures. Indeed, even though it’s the first (and often only) technique most people will think of, it is also the most inefficient and time consuming. And it can lose a lot, I mean a lot, of the quality of the original slide or negative. Read more…
The Canon EOS M is quickly becoming the laughingstock of the mirrorless party due to its autofocus system, which leaves much to be desired in terms of speed. To show just how sluggish the system really is, Tomek Kulas over at M43.eu did this very simple yet informative “hands-on test” that pits the EOS M against one of its archrivals: the Olympus OM-D EM-5. Read more…
Photographers who have been patiently waiting for Adobe to bring Retina-compatibility to Lightroom will be glad to know that support is indeed part of the next update to the popular photo-editing program. In fact, you can download the compatible version already: Adobe has released a Lightroom 4.3 Release Candidate so photographers can help test the app and help squash bug before it becomes an official release. Read more…
Last week, we wrote that Nikon was tooting its own horn by claiming that both the D4 and D800 DSLRs had passed the European Broadcasting Union test, popularly known as the BBC test, making them the “first DSLR cameras fit for broadcast.” Now it appears that the horns were tooted prematurely, as the BBC is refuting Nikon’s interpretation of the tests. Read more…
Nokia’s 808 PureView phone packs a hefty 41-megapixel sensor, but how do its megapixels compare to a “real” 40+ megapixel camera photo? Spanish website Quesabesde decided to find out by putting the phone head-to-head with the 40MP Pentax 645D medium format DSLR. They shot the same scenes with both cameras, and blew them up to examine the quality. The article is in Spanish, but a little Google Translate magic does the trick.
What do you get if you apply every Instagram filter to a single photograph? Belgian blog Appelogen decided to find out, starting with a normal photo of a pathway and applying one filter at a time. The resulting image is pretty abstract, and prompted them to ask the question, “is it art?”
If you think 14fps on a high end DSLR is fast, check out this video by Mike’s Electric Stuff. In it, he does an extreme teardown of a cheap Panasonic Lumix compact camera and spends 30 minutes exploring and explaining the various components. At about 18 minutes in, he hooks up a signal generator to the shutter mechanism to see how fast the shutter can flap. He’s able to take it up to around 70 flaps per second before the shutter begins to stutter. The limiting factor in FPS isn’t the mechanical components of a camera, but how fast the sensor and memory card can capture and store data.
