I have a special interest in manual focus 50mm lenses. It began with a Praktica film SLR that was bundled with a 50mm f/2.8 Meyer-Optic Görlitz lens. Next came a Canon Ftb SLR with a 50mm f/1.4 FD SSC lens. This lens had a noticeable improvement in image quality along with a much better anti-reflection coating.
The Z30 mirrorless camera is Nikon's third APS-C (DX) system that takes advantage of the Z-mount. While clearly marketed at content creators, vloggers, and social media influencers, the compact system has everything a solo-operating content creator needs to get up and running for video and photo.
I received a request from Apexel to review a phone accessory that connects to microscopes, telescopes, or binoculars. I replied to inform them that I had none of those pieces of equipment but I might be interested in reviewing a macro or microscope attachment to mobile phones.
Can a mid-range smartphone that focuses more on gaming also deliver something worth capturing with its cameras? The Poco X5 Pro acts like it’s up for the job, only to then force a lot of compromises.
The new Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K G2 successfully carries on the company’s tradition of providing affordable creation tools dedicated to video and cinema creation.
Wacom's Cintiq Pro 27 might be expensive, but it is one of the most immersive, accurate, and stable display tablets ever.
DJI’s RS 3 Mini is a scaled-down version of the popular RS line of gimbals that supports a lighter payload and has scaled-down motors and a more petite frame to accommodate today’s lighter mirrorless cameras -- but doesn't skimp on features.
Samsung stuck with a familiar look in the Galaxy S23 Ultra, but it’s what is underneath that counts and it pushes the phone’s camera forward as a tougher competitor.
Sony’s new Sony 50mm f/1.4 GM is a compact, fast, and high-resolution lens in Sony’s upper-echelon G Master lineup, and it joins Sony’s already flush 50mm focal length lineup.
CFexpress has finally come into its own and multiple companies are now producing a wide variety of capacities at a range of prices. But with so many choices, which one should you buy?
Zhiyun's FiveRay F100 LED light sticks have a solid level of power, are easy to maneuver, are affordable, and can perform a wide variety of lighting tasks. They're great lights, marred mainly by frustrating controls.
The Viltrox AF 75mm f/1.2 doesn't slot neatly into Viltrox's existing prime lens lineup for APS-C cameras (and currently for Fuji X-mount) - in fact, I'd call it an aberration, an experiment, possibly even a mistake. But what a wonderful mistake.
The OnePlus 11 isn’t a debut by any means. OnePlus has been selling phones in various markets for years, but this one marks a shift in approach to being fashionable and credible -- not to mention cheaper -- while also dealing with its branding challenges in a place where Apple, Samsung, and Google reign.
Canon’s M50 APS-C camera was introduced in February of 2018 when Canon had yet to truly enter the mirrorless camera market, and its tiny new APS-C Canon EOS R50 is more than just a replacement for the M50.
With the introduction of the R50 and the R8, Canon further teeters on the edge of having too many cameras rather than too few.
Sigma’s 50mm f/1.4 DG DN Art takes its place as the latest lens in Sigma’s venerable high-end lens line and is a welcome addition thanks to excellent performance and a low cost of entry.
Why do we raise a camera? Hit the shutter, look down at the image? What drives us to be recorders of memory? Do these memories matter? Who will see them? What will they think?
RODE's NT-USB+ is a modern update on a microphone that was one of the best desktop podcasting mics you could buy for the past several years. This new version makes necessary upgrades without taking away from what made the original great. It's an all-around win.
There are now tons of pen tablet makers out there and the options have given new users far more power to choose from a wide variety of styles, features, and obviously prices. The new $40 Veikk Voila L gives beginners an impressively competent "bare-bones" pen tablet to learn on for scant little investment.
Excire Foto positions itself as able to help photographers tag, organize, and search their images quickly, including the capability to search through images to the level of discerning if subjects in them are smiling or not. It sounds powerful, but how helpful is it really?
Low-cost lenses started appearing in the market in the last twenty years or so, with prices coming down steadily. When I saw another inexpensive lens in an article a couple of months ago, it grabbed my attention not with its price but with its core feature. It was a shift lens. An 18mm, fixed-aperture at f/8, shift lens at $119 was worth trying.
Apple’s Mac mini has always been positioned as the company’s affordable desktop machine, an alternative to the low-end iMac for those that don’t need or want the iMac’s display. It’s a machine that has sometimes seemed to languish while other Mac models got performance upgrades. That has changed.
You don’t often come across a phone with a retractable portrait camera, but that’s one of the signature features of the Tecno Phantom X2 Pro. Is this just a gimmick seeking credibility, or a credible point of contention compared to others?
Apple got so much right when it launched the M1 Max MacBook Pro in 2021 that it didn't need to do much to make a compelling successor other than beef up the performance. And, honestly, that's exactly what the company did in the M2 Max MacBook Pro.
While there are a multitude of lightweight portable strobes, few are powerful enough to compete with the sun or have enough juice to double as a studio strobe. Those are exactly the problems Elinchrom looked to address with its FIVE system.
Apple's Mac mini and Mac Studio have set new standards for the kind of power and performance that can be expected from a small chassis. While Intel's new NUC isn't quite as small, it does show that PCs can get almost as svelte and still perform outstandingly well.
Canon’s EOS R6 Mark II is a major yet, in some ways, a subtle upgrade over the original R6. The new R6 Mark II is faster and more capable than the R6 in most regards, and it addresses several of the limitations found in the original model.
SmallRig seems to have taken the reviews of the previous generation of its COB lighting to heart and made some significant improvements to both the design and performance of the new RC 450D (Daylight) and 450B (BiColor) COB LED lights.
I use various microphones on my YouTube channel and while the majority of them would be considered high-end, the one I’ve been using recently is the Rode VideoMicro II.
As the mirrorless camera market hits its stride and companies have caught up on their typical prime and zoom lens offerings, we see new offerings in non-traditional focal lengths. I can’t remember writing the words “all-in-one” in my decades in the tech press world as I have in the last year.
