 Photo News Monthly is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, especially patrons of our parent program, Daily Tech News Show. Get the ad-free version of this show and more Patreon.com slash DTNS. Coming up on Photo News Monthly, Nikon says goodbye. Big sensors coming to phones and is firmware a beta test. This is the photography news for the month of July 2022 in lovely Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Rich Travolino. And from North of the Wall, I'm Anthony Lemos. You know, during the week, photography news sometimes gets lost in the shuffle, especially in the overall tech sector. So once a month, we shine the spotlight on it. We dig through the cracks. We pull out the little photo news that's growing in between the great slabs of concrete that is social networks and gadgets. So let's get started with a bit of photo news you might have missed. I like to say we raised the shutter on the photo news of the month. Okay, I'm more of a pinhole photo news guy, but that's okay. No, that makes sense. Nikon announced new APS-C mirrorless camera aimed at vloggers, the Z30. Yes, I said Z30. This uses a 20.9 megapixel sensor, seemingly the same used in the Z50 and the ZFC. Offers a flip out display and can record 4K 30 frames per second video using the entire width of the sensor for up to 125 minutes. It ships in mid-July for $710 for the body or 850 with a kit lens. In fun lens news, Venus Optics announced the Laowa 10 millimeter F4 cookie lens for APS-C mounts. It's a pancake style rectilinear lens, which means it's not fisheye basically. It offers an equivalent ultra wide field of view of about 15 millimeters in a svelte 130 gram frame, so it shouldn't have a lot of weight there. It's available now for $299. Arju Cam announced a new 108 megapixel camera module designed for machine vision applications. It's diminutive, diminutive, no, see there you go. It's diminutive, it's small size means it can work well with single board computers like the Raspberry Pi, although it uses a standard USB 3.0 interface, so it'll work just about anywhere. It can shoot up to 1.3 frames per second at full resolution or up to 14 frames per second at 12 megapixels. It's available now for $399. This might seem high, but Arju Cam is aiming this as an affordable replacement to industrial cameras at a price that independent engineers can access. All right, now we head to space. NASA released the first images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope this month. The deep field photo seems to be getting a lot of attention given the unimaginable scope and clarity the image presents. The deep field shot took 12 and a half hours to capture. More significantly, it captured a glass Z13, you see I said Z there properly, the oldest galaxy ever photographed. The light from the telescope shows the galaxy 300 to 400 million years after the Big Bang, meaning that it's now 13 and a half billion years old, give or take a couple hundred million. The telescope has already, though, paid a price for this impressive imagery. NASA disclosed that a micro meteoroid struck one of the telescope's 18 hexagonal mirrors between May 22nd and May 24th. We're really just getting the details of this now, hence why it's in July. This caused a significant blemish in one area that caused significant, uncorrectable change in the overall figure of that segment. NASA expects the overall impact on the telescope's mission to be small as the other mirrors remain unblemished and realigning the mirrors allows it to operate within performance limits. Just amazing. Researchers at Samsung Labs developed an improved neural head avatar technology called megaportraits, essentially allowing them to apply the facial expressions and movements from a video of one face and apply it to a static image of another face. The team believes this is the first to achieve a megapixel resolution. Current limitations mean that it can only process frontal or near-frontal views. Yeah, but you should check out the link in the show notes. It's pretty impressive. They have Angelina Jolie and I think President Buchanan on it. It's very bizarre. It's a little, it's odd. All right. Well, Amos, what was the big news this week? Well, one of the big pieces of news this month was the Nikkei Asia reporting that Nikon will stop developing single lens reflex cameras altogether. Nikon had previously said they would not develop another flagship DSLR after the D6, but this means no new DSLRs are coming at all. If you thought Nikon was already out of the DSLR market, you might have good reason. The D6 was the last model released in June of 2020. Nikon didn't confirm this report, but it said it will continue to produce, distribute and support existing DSLR models, but had already told investors it planned to wind down its DSLR business by 2025. So, I mean, you know, don't worry. You can still get the D5600 in target. Nikon first started producing film SLRs back in 1959. Yes, the venerable Nikon F. So, 60 years of that, I guess, design methodology, that type of camera, rather, although let's be honest, the film and digital DSLRs are worlds apart. I mean, so Amos, I have to confess something. I have never shot a DS, I've never owned, I've shot one. I've never owned a DSLR. So, my entire digital life has been either point and shoots and I move right to mirrorless. So, I mean, as someone who I know has shot at a high level, you know, pretty intense stuff, a lot of sports and stuff like that with a DSLR. I mean, are you surprised by this? Does this seem too late, too early? Like, how do we read this from Nikon? Not just from Nikon, but in the industry overall, because Canon, Sony, they're all doing the same things. None of them are really in the DSLR game anymore. And the thing is that with a mirrorless, there are fewer parts, there's fewer points of failure, and you're getting one less thing between your image and your eye, not necessarily the image in the sensor, because, you know, by definition, the mirror flips up out of the way. So, the sensor is actually getting, you know, 100%. But when you're looking at it, you have a physical barrier between the thing that you're looking at through the lens and your eye. And some people always had a problem with that. Now, people seem to have a problem with the mirrorless aspect, because there's so slight lag in it, which I can't notice. But maybe my eyes just aren't very good. I think this is kind of the natural evolution. And the timing of it would surprise me if they were announcing this right now. But as we just mentioned, the last model was a couple of years ago. So them discontinuing support for things like that, you know, not even discontinuing support, but not releasing more models with the single lens reflex technology is kind of right where it seems to be in my mind. Yeah. And while the majority, you're right, Canon is not exactly coming out and saying, hey, we got the Mark V or whatever, 5D Mark V coming out anytime soon. Pentax, Sil says they're going to be doing, Ricoh Pentax, Sil says they're going to be doing DSLRs, they're not going mirrorless yet. But my question to you, Amos, is looking at it kind of from the outside, it seems like if we weren't depending on basically every kind of interchangeable lens camera to be a hybrid camera, essentially at this point, like video, video killed the DSLR, right? Yeah. That's part of it, because even the DSLRs were all flipping up the mirror in order to capture directly to the sensor. I really just, I think this is, they're starting to see the smaller bodies that you can have when you don't have the mirror that needs to flip up. And you're getting the same, you know, you can use that space, because you're reducing the amount of space required, but you're not reducing the actual size of the body, because you're using more of that space for heat sinks, for different processors from, you know, larger buffer size, things like that. I just think that this is where it needs to go. And especially with the, with mechanical failures, if it's one less thing that's going to get jostled and knocked out of place when I dropped my camera in my bag in a hurry and grabbed another body with a different frame or different lens on it, it's just one less thing that they had to worry about and one less thing to have to engineer for. I do also think that there is a, like, especially Canon, I mean, all the, all the people that have jumped over to mirror, all the companies seem to have recognized this is also an opportunity to kind of really push lens design in really interesting ways, because you can get so much closer to the sensor or whatever the plane, you can, you can really push the glass like super, super close in a way that you can't when you have a mirror box right there with a DSLR. So I, you know, we're seeing like really interesting like that, that Canon 28 to 70 f2 we're seeing just like, like, like a lot of innovation in terms of just sharper lenses, faster lenses in ways that I don't think would be practical, like certainly listen, these all have top notch optical engineers, but to put it in like a semi usable size, I know that 28 to 70 is a bit of a beast and it's ridiculously expensive, but like we've seen that there is a, there seems to be a market shift in sharpness and kind of lens capability as well kind of with the shift in mirrorless too. I don't know if the lenses are driving the shift to the mirrorless form factor or if the mirrorless form factor is allowing the lenses, but it either way you look at it, it is a great time to refresh lens lines when you're shifting to a new, you know, the mirrorless form factors. Sony has had great lenses for a while on their mirrorless bodies. Canon is using this as an opportunity to come out with the RF line of lenses, which one for one, if you match that with the older, you know, the, if you match an RF lens to an EF lens, almost unanimously the RF lens has better optics and is giving better results. So, you know, I don't know that the two are necessarily linked, but they're at least linked by opportunity and it's a great time. Real quick, for people that, is there any reason to choose, if you have X amount of dollars, you have a couple thousand dollars, you want to invest in a high-end camera system, is there any reason to choose an SLR, like a DSLR at this point, like battery life probably still is a big advantage. If you absolutely, if you're shooting like, I'm thinking like, like super fast action where you absolutely, like you cannot have any lag, but like I would have to be that, that would be like racing or something like that where it's like so incredibly fast. I can't, like the battery life is the big advantage, right? Battery life is the big advantage. If you're getting into the market now and you're looking for lens or a body, you're going to go mirrorless unless, first, because even the mirrorless models have physical shutters that can be actuated and used to combat things like rolling shutter and, you know, distortion in the soccer ball. Not the Z9. That's true. That's true. But I can't see. Yeah. Shutterless. Shutterless is the future. Shutterless is the new mirrorless. They're going to have to increase the speeds of the reading. They're going to, in order to eliminate the shutter entirely, you need a full frame sensor capture and that's. That's tough ticket. Well, it's a lot of more processing and a lot more bandwidth on the camera's bus and everything else. So I'm saying that's the next step, but it's not quite there right now, even on the Z9. It's just, it's not quite fully baked. And, you know, iterative process will get there, but we're not quite there right now. So. Well, one place we are is in a realm of increasingly bigger camera phone sensors. That's called a segue. You're welcome. We've seen phone makers trying to cram in larger sensors for a while. We can look all the way back to the Halcyon days when Nokia broke new ground with the almost one inch sensor in the Nokia peer view 808. A phone I still look for on eBay and probably would buy at the right price. Panasonic technically shipped a one inch sensor on a camera that happened to be an Android phone with the CM one back in 2015. That was really just a camera with a clunky phone interface. But more recently, Sony has shipped the Xperia pro one with the same stack sensor it uses in the RX 100 mark seven, although the phone's lines actually crops into the sensor a little bit. So you can argue, is it really getting the advantage of one inch sensor? But this month, Sony announced the first one inch smartphone camera sensor that's kind of native for smartphones, the 50 megapixel IMX 989. It's designed to be used natively, so you don't have to crop it. And they're working with the phone makers to make that happen. The first one being Xiaomi that they are putting out. Yes, I'm sorry. I totally lost my place. The first ones being Xiaomi that they are working with. They are not the first to kind of announce kind of these and these ambitious new camera sensors. Samsung has its large ISO cell GN one sensor has a lot of impressive specs hasn't actually shipped. Supposedly it's going to. But Jami has in there. Jami has the Sony one inch sensor now in their 12 as ultra flag ship. It's a large sensor. It's able to shoot 12 megapixel pixel bend images. So it gathers different pixels from that larger 50 megapixel down to 12. You can also shoot a full resolution offers optical image stabilization and can shoot up to 8k 24p for the no one that needs that the verge reviewed the phone and found that in low light it was able to retain more detail with less crushed blacks and even against the 108 megapixel camera in the Samsung S 22 produced sharper photos. But most of this was only viewable at 100 percent magnification and the camera itself had some weird exposure decisions in mixed lighting. So you know Amos it seems like if for most people their phone is their photos are going on Instagram or to other phone screens you know you're sending it in messages and stuff like that. A lot of times down resist anyway when you send it. Yes this is an impressive technical accomplishment. Will we see other phone makers go after bigger hardware or is this going to be continue to be a software focused kind of innovative arena for phones. The problem with this that I see is you can have a one inch sensor. But what kind of lens do you have in front of it. What kind of optics do you have in front of it. Something has to give either the phone has to be really thick. The sensor has to be underpowered or the optics aren't going to hold up to what the sensor can can attain. Unless you want a really thick phone you're not going to get I guess I'm I'm tired of them trying to shove bigger cameras and bigger sensors into smaller phones. The computational photography we have now is amazing. You know like let's spend more time in that for the people that are just wanting to take pictures and leave the amazing optics and exceptional sensor sizes to the professional cameras or even the hobbyist cameras can have a much larger sensor than what you're going to pack in a phone. I'm not of the mindset that you need all of this power in a phone because it's not going to go to the greatest of use and people are going to spend a lot of money on really really fancy selfies. Yeah and the other thing is that large sensors are good for low light. Like I'm sure this sensor just is going to be able to perform better at higher ISOs than you know your typical well I don't know like one 1.5 inch sensor whatever the weird fractions you have to use to to measure phone sensors for tiny sensors. But one I've noticed this a lot with with my iPhone is that because you're able it's the sensor is so small because the lens is so short phones are able to get away with like ridiculously slow shutter speeds and with computational photography they stack images dynamically they can do that extremely quickly and you can shoot at 1 15th of a second it looks kind of okay again unless you punch in then everything looks soft but no one ever does that because you're just going to post it to Instagram. But in a lot of ways larger sensors have a lot of problems like if you're using the RX100 7 sensor you know that's a stack sensor super fast readout if it doesn't have that fast of readout your video all the sudden you know can get a lot more squishy like that's why the iPhone and phones are able to do like 4k video before a lot of your pro end cameras could because the refresh rate you can you can refresh that sensor so much faster you get less rolling shutter yes it's sure it's softer it's less detailed but there is a lot of computational overhead that comes along or like like physical overhead that comes along with having that larger sensor and you're not really going to be able to get any physical advantage to your point you're going to have to have a super wide lens on there anyway so you're not going to get any shallow depth of field unless you're using computational photography which phones are already doing with much smaller sensors so yes like as a as a camera nerd would I love it if an iPhone came with like a branded glass and a one inch sensor and I'd be like yes this is what I this is what I want but for you know I mean at least in the States Xiaomi devices aren't necessarily the easiest to procure so and Sony ones basically have no market share here so even if Sony you know comes out put this on their own phone good luck finding it anywhere yeah the so I applaud the audacity of trying to shove large camera hardware into very thin phones I just you're right the the glass situation it just I feel like it adds more problems than it's solving at this point my my thing on this is if you want a 15 megapixel sensor cool if you want a if you want a low light sensor then don't give me 50 megapixels give me 12 megapixels and give me cells in that in that sensor that are four times as many microns across they're going to gather more light they're going to be able to do a lot more and you're going to have a lot less overhead on the other hardware in there and then the glass isn't going to be as particular because you're not trying to shove all those pixels in there and oh by the way you can use a 12 megapixel picture on instagram on twitter whatever else probably a lot easier than you can a 50 megapixel because your phone's going to have to compress it to get it to fit onto the platform anyway so if you're going to have a big sensor then at least give me bigger cells on that sensor that are going to gather more light and not have to you know crunch anything it's just going to give me good data and that's that's where i'm at with it they they're they're chasing numbers instead of chasing the positive effects of what they could do with it i mean to be fair mirrorless camera like any any camera that chips with like 8k or 6 and a half k they're also doing that but at least like there's other benefits right to it as now now you want to get my jammy you want to get my attention put a fove on sensor in their phone it'll be slow it'll overheat immediately it'll be completely impractical i can't edit the raw files but i will love you and i will buy that phone i will drive to china that one picture you take is going to be amazing the colors are going to be so beautiful i love it all right well if you want to run down every single day of just the tech headlines we've got just the thing for you you can check out our related show daily tech headlines all the essential tech news in about five minutes daily tech headlines dot com this month we saw a bunch of major firmware updates from cameras that added some significant features panasonic panasonic's gh6 added pro res raw output over hdmi and the ability to internally record 4k 60 in pro res 422 the canon r3 added the ability to set a custom high speed continuous mode letting you define the number of shots and frame rate in that mode it also added new high speed recording timelapse and focus stacking features not to be left out the sony fx3 added new log shooting modes let importing and timecode sync now adding functionality with a camera with firmware always seems great it'll it's like you're getting more camera for free but these features are so important if these features are so important the camera why didn't any of them ship with it originally we're also increasingly seen manufacturers announce features at launch that will come in a future firmware update casey over a camera conspiracy's posted a video that fuji's kaizen strategy of adding continued functionality to cameras over time and for where basically amounted to beta testing incomplete cameras on users but it seems like every camera maker is doing it this these days so rich is it is it advanced betas that we're getting on these cameras or yeah it really does feel like that where there's this rush to get you know get your thing to market as quick as possible listen i i understand these all of these camera makers have been operating under crazy supply supply chain constraints over the past two and a half years um so that the fact that they're able to ship anything given how how niche now at this point like camera sensors and all that stuff are like kudos for beating that but if you're gonna delay stuff at least fix your software first i i feel like it's so i mean don't get me wrong i had a panasonic lx 10 is a little it's like an enthusiast point and shoot it's a nice camera one inch sensor hey it was a nice camera there were a couple things i was hoping maybe for a little bit more video support like some hdmi out stuff and i kept checking they never it's still on 1.0 firmware i'm still upset about it panasonic you're dead to me anyway i'm not i'm just kidding but the so like i get like improve things over time fix bugs that's fantastic but we are fuji is a perfect example of this you know to to kind of casey's point uh in his in his video you know they'll put out a camera and say like well we're gonna fix the autofocus in a future firmware update i feel like that's an important enough thing like if you're able to substantially iterate on that i mean panasonic's also famous for this uh it seems like every new camera they come out with they have a new algorithm for the depth of defocus to improve it a little bit and and put that stuff out there and nikon just did this not too long ago right after sony and kenan had these basically majorly showed them up with their autofocus nikon came out with a improved version of their autofocus that didn't quite meet kenan and and sony but definitely vastly improved its capabilities yeah and i and i get like with with a high-end flagship camera you probably have your four or five core use cases right it's like okay this is for the pure video shooter here the features they absolutely need so we can ship this we need these frame rates we need this support for for whatever for our hybrid you know for if you're going to be using this for events and weddings and stuff like that okay here's the use cases we need for that you're a wildlife guy whatever i'm sure that every camera manufacturer has like their ideal customer and they make i would hope they would make sure to ship with that all of these seem a little bit more ancillary like i don't know if you wouldn't have bought the gh6 if you couldn't record 4k 60p at progress 422 out of the gate like i don't think that's holding anyone back from buying it but like you know the r3 that custom high-speed continuous uh i think first of all super cool feature that feels like that again i'm not a programmer i'm not a developer i'm an idiot i i know how to press the button and take the picture okay but that seems like something they could have shipped with now if you're going to tell me we have x amount of engineering time if we did that we'd have to leave out some other feature name the other feature you want us to leave out i get it also is it i still think it's it's bet this is better than these are dead platforms once we release them and if it crashes if you're if it wipes your card out when you press these six things on the d-pad your s o well and oh well buy the camera when it comes out in two years i appreciate that we do see multi-year support coming out you know long tail support for these for companies that aren't receiving it like a financial award they haven't figured out how to work worm a service model under all of my cameras right at this point it's the it's the announcing future firmware features at launch that really kind of makes me mad at that point i'm just like wait to release wait till it's done then if it's that if you if you're going to sell me on the promise of future features that feels a little shady to me i i basically i break down firmware updates into three categories and i'll give you an example of each one you have the the category where they suddenly realize that through usage in the wide market in users hands and consumers hands they can accomplish something that they didn't think they could accomplish before and i think that's where this 295 frames a second for a quarter of a second on this r3 like they're like hey you know what we can actually do this this is something we can do and there might be a market for it let's go ahead and throw it out there got it you know something you didn't know you could do and now you think you can do it and it's going to work good toss it out there cool you gave me a feature i wasn't expecting it wasn't something that you promised later on it's just hey we figured something out you can do with your camera go for then you have the we thought we had it good but we realized we had to adjust it later for this i'm going to give you the example of the canon r5 a couple updates ago they realized through i'm sure not just my email that their their face id or face uh face focusing wasn't as effective on dark skinned people in my case it was most of my family some of us complained about it they came out with a firmware update that really does improve the the camera's ability to focus on a face and identify the face on darker skinned people they they thought they had it were good they didn't they fixed it in firmware all for it then you have the things like oh you should have known that this was going to be an issue and you would you finally addressed it in form firmware the r5 now on the latest version can record for longer has a new mode where it will withstand more heat before it shuts itself down in the middle of your recording why like you knew this was a limitation of the camera you released the camera with this limitation that was not what anybody wanted and then you came in later and said oh well we're giving you a new mode that should have been part of the whole thing in the very beginning you know you're now you're delivering a promise because they were supposed to be able to record 30 minutes of video and people are getting 20 minutes and the camera was shutting off you know now you're getting now you're providing them a way to accomplish what you already told them they could do that's where it irritates me you know yeah and I think the maybe the analogy here are game consoles which again have that longer kind of tale of support you know these are platforms that will be supported you know for four five six years down the line and I do think there is an element of kind of like a game console where a lot of it is the developers figuring out how to eke out additional performance like you were saying with the the high super high frame rate stuff I feel like that's something where they're like oh we figured out on this you know whatever the DSP is or whatever they need to do to to eke that out that feels like something that they've had engineers working with that silicon for specifically for a long time they figured out a way to eke that out potentially maybe you know it was in the pipeline or something like that so I do realize like some of this is how can we do that I also understand that there is a limited financial reward for especially once something hits like two three years old where you're like but they're going to refresh it in a couple of years and I really want you know there is there is a fine line of keep active support adding features versus we're not going to it's not worth our investment to do that um but yeah it's it's just don't don't make me regret buying your thing on launch day when you when you promise me a feature that's going to drop a year later yeah I always go into it assuming that the features they say are coming won't yeah and my purchasing decision on that not on the promise of of the summers to come well uh speaking of summers to come Kodak it may be the summer of Kodak because they've announced that they're repurposing some of their equipment used to manufacture film for use on electric vehicle batteries as part of an investment with Wildcat Discovery Technology Wildcat already manufactures EV batteries so they're not like just getting into that business but Kodak realized it requires similar coatings and engineering services that it already uses an STAR film based production with minimal retooling as part of its expansion of its advanced materials and chemical business Kodak Kodak has attempted to expand into pharmaceuticals and healthcare operations over the past few years as well uh really I mean really Kodak is a chemical company at this point I mean they've always been a chemical company that happens to still produce film um I mean good to see them staying relevant in what seems like it's going to be a booming industry for decades to come right and at the same time also it's hard enough to find film like can't you just keep making more film okay so I was of two minds of this because my first thought was so they're taking these machines out of circulation of making film base uh and and now there's even less machines that in this extremely specialized field to make film bases but then I realized if they're able to do this and they're able to do the set scale that also means that there's minimal retooling to move it the other way right to move it back to doing the coding for the film so if they're able to expand this business buy more you know like again these are highly specialized machines so if they were able to buy more of them and invest more of them over time because they have this line of business maybe that means they're able to put a little bit more r&d money back into the film business uh so that's awful optimistic rich okay I will stay optimistic I know they're listen I know they're a company literally it's like as soon as the ledger the decimal point on the ledger moves a certain way they're going to be like film's dead goodbye it was nice making color film forever but I'm hoping this staves off the decimal point just for a little longer yeah we're rounding air away from losing half the stock we would love to hear from you if you love our stories and you want to comment on them or if you think there's 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