If there's ever been a position in the camera world where the majority of the  Japanese companies keep their butts clenched, it's APS-C. That really boils down to a simple thought: in order to provide lower priced entry products they need the cost savings implicit in APS-C, but they really don't want those lower priced products to compete with the higher end and higher margin products they make.  Almost by definition, even a top APS-C camera, such as the Canon R7, needs to not be good enough that almost everyone would forgo the full frame models, such as the Canon R6 Mark II. One wa ..read more

"We're often asked: 'Will AI-generated images replace photographers?' The answer is yes... for certain kinds of photography. For example, stock photography might be replaced by AI-generated images in the next 3-5 years." email from Eric Yang, CEO of Topaz Labs. Good lord let's hope not. The implication of these kinds of statements about AI is that everything that could be done has been done. That's because the current AI implementations all work from knowledge of things that they've scanned. AI is not really a creative thinker. Even those so-called "hallucinations" you might hear ab ..read more

If no one releases new products for a month, the photography Web sites all start hallucinating.  Some rumor sites are posting “coming in 2025” camera models that, well, aren’t coming. I asked ChatGPT just to see what it might hallucinate, and for Nikon it came up with Z9II, Z7III, Z5II, Nikon Cinema camera, Coolpix P1000, and screw-drive lens adapter. Well, one of those is true, and two of the others are possible. ChatGPT's response is actually a better list than what two other rumor sites I saw had posted, though.  Meanwhile, another site just published a “Top 10 Best Cameras Under ..read more

We've got lots to talk about, but lets start with a basic trend for mirrorless cameras over the past several years: The average selling price (left axis) of a mirrorless camera went up 200% in five years (bottom axis) according to CIPA. That probably reflects that the serious users who buy more expensive equipment have been transitioning from DSLR to mirrorless. The plateau of average selling price for the past three years is troublesome, though, as it hints that the primary buying spree for the highest end cameras may be over. Still, as I pointed out in my recent article on zsystemuser, a ..read more

You may remember back in August of 2024 when I surveyed site readers hinting at some potential big changes I was contemplating. You might have also noticed I didn't report the findings and there have been no changes. So let's start with that survey. Many thousands of votes—I closed the survey fairly quickly when it produced more than enough data to contemplate—said that 60% of you wanted me to keep the sites/books/workshops as is, while a quarter of you would opt for a US$5/month subscription. That was pretty much verification of what I had already concluded. Moreover, I had already planned c ..read more

So, you received a new camera for the holidays. At this point you’ve likely had time to fiddle with it, but today’s headline question is the important one: have you bonded with your new camera yet? I’ve been preaching some form of this notion since I first started writing about cameras. Your camera is a tool. You have to learn how to use that tool. The very best practitioners don’t just learn their tool, but the tool becomes second nature to them. They know exactly what it will and won’t do and how to coax it to do what they want. At some point users become so close to their tools that you’d ..read more

I'm not going to take a long break this holiday season. I've got a lot on plate I'm working on, but don't expect any new posts between now and January 2nd, 2025.  Enjoy your holiday ..read more

I’m not home as I write this so don’t have access to my full lens set or the ability to set scenes up to demonstrate the difference, so we’re going to do this with words. In some ways, working with words is better, because we won’t get hung up on things you do or don’t see in a compressed JPEG image on whatever size display you’re looking at. A question that came up several times in my recent LA appearance had to do with “which lens is better?” That’s not an answerable question without more parameters being considered. At one point I talked about the Nikkor f/1.8 S primes versus the Nikkor f ..read more

In the smartphone versus dedicated camera comparisons I keep seeing, there's an interesting sub-theme that everyone seems to be missing. It actually corresponds to why I decided to write Mastering Nikon JPEGs (due in Q1 2025).  Put simply, everyone is comparing smartphone "build-a-scene" with camera defaults.  What do I mean by this? Let's start with "build-a-scene." Almost all smartphones today run with the sensor actively before and after any "shutter release" action. They take anywhere from eight to 32 images and run the image processor on all of them to create the "moment" you p ..read more

Canon announced a new global shutter image sensor available to other companies this week, and that has all the photography Web sites salivating over possible APS-C global shutter cameras. The problem? Canon's available sensor is a 16:9 crop, essentially Super35, not APS-C. It's also only 10.3mp, which would be considered low for modern still cameras (though it allows for full pixel use 4K video at 60P).  Yes, there are rumors that the eventual R7 Mark II will have a global shutter, but it doesn't seem that this new available-to-all chip is  a precursor of that, particularly conside ..read more