 Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, especially our patrons. Remember, you can get an ad-free version of this show and more at Patreon.com slash DTNS. Coming up on the show, action cams heat up, cameras start sporting SSDs and will we soon see a new 35mm point and shoot. This is the photography news for the month of September 2022 in lovely Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Rich Trafalino. And from North of the Wall, I'm Anthony Lemos. You know, during the month, photography news sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. So once a month, we shine the spotlight on it. We crank it up. We stop it down. We get everything in focus. We have a lot of depth of field into the news. So let's start with a bit of photo news you might have missed. Viltrox is a Chinese lens maker that's made a name for itself, providing affordable autofocus lenses with good performance. It's also pretty good at reverse engineering lens mounts, providing autofocus lenses for Fuji's X mount years before it opened up to third parties. Over the past few months, people noticed their recent lenses for Canon's RF mount were no longer available from retailers. In an age of constant supply chain constraints, it wasn't clear why they weren't available. And now we have a statement from Canon Germany. It said, Canon believes that these products infringe that their patent and design rights and has therefore requested the company to stop all activities that infringe Canon's intellectual property rights. In other words, they just, they went, they went all for themselves. Either there was, there was a lawsuit on the table or Viltrox didn't want to do a lawsuit. But yeah, the old legal action taken away your, it doesn't seem great for third party RF lenses at this point. Right. All right, next up, Topaz Labs offers some well-regarded and enhancement photo editing tools, things like Denoise AI, Sharpen AI and Gigapixel AI. Gigapixel particularly always impresses me. Now the company will integrate these three apps under a new Topaz photo AI app. This will include a new autopilot feature, which will automatically suggest adjustments across all three modules. Topaz photo AI will also include plugins for Adobe Lightroom Classic, Adobe Photoshop and Capture One. It's available now for $199. It's actually, it's actually pretty compelling. Fuji announced the X-H2 mirrorless camera. It uses the same body as the already released X-H2S, but swaps the cameras stacked 26 megapixel sensor with a 40 megapixel X-Trans sensor. It can shoot video at up to 8K at 30 frames per second offers 160 megapixel pixel shift mode. It's available now for $2,000 and pixel shift always just great. The name or the tech? The name. Okay. You're on, you're on board with like high resolution photo stacking. Okay. I just want to be clear. All right. Well, it was a big month for APS-C camera releases. Sony announced the FX30 cinema camera. They actually did it like yesterday, so that's kind of cool. It's almost identical to the existing FX3, but uses a 26 megapixel APS-C sensor versus full frame on the FX3. It can shoot oversampled 4K at up to 60 frames per second and cropped 120p video, records internally at 10 bit 422 video and includes IBIS as well as an active cooling fan. It ships in October for $1,799. Pretty interesting price point. Anytime video has active cooling, I just think where's the, where's the microphone? Only 10 Zeiss planter 50 millimeter f.0.7 lenses were ever produced. That's a 50 millimeter f.0.7. Six of them were made for NASA. Three of the remaining units were acquired by Stanley Kubrick and modified to be used as cinema lenses for the film Barry Linden. Used in a scene lit by only two candles. Wide open, it lets in two stops more light than f.1.4 lens. Now the lens is returned to Zeiss to go and display at its museum of optics lent by the firm's executive producer, Jan Harlin. Oh, Jan given up. Was he shooting with it? Like he was just sitting there with it on a shelf, right? I mean, I guess you wouldn't do anything with it because you'd be terrified of breaking it. But it's one of those things where you're always wondering what executive producers actually do. And now, you know, they steal lenses from set. Hey, to be like, the article is definitely worth a read because it goes into like how like he had to like call up Zeiss and convince them to make this with working with like a film gate and stuff like that. So it was super interesting and amazing optic. And keep in mind, 10 minus six minus three is still one. So where's the other one at? I think NASA's not telling us something. That seems to be the likelihood. Yeah, probably give it to the aliens. They need to see. That's what's on the James Webb telescope, actually. They just sent it up there. All right. Well, it's been a big month for action cams. DJ, I'm announced the Osmo action three. This ditches the module design of its predecessor, the Osmo action two. It could shoot up to 4k 120 frames per second video with its rock steady 3.0 stabilization on it natively supports vertical video because that's what the kids like. And is waterproof up to 52 feet. I think the original one was about 33 feet or somewhere around there. It's available for pre order now for $329, but not to be outdone. Amos, I don't know why. So when do you read it? So why don't you take over? Do you want to redo that? Well, Rich, GoPro announced the hero 11 black and 11 black mini cameras. They can record up to 5.3 k video in an open gate eight to seven aspect ratio. This enables the mode where it can maintain level video regardless of how the camera is rotated. Oh, what the kids want? The mini lacks the front and rear screens and has a non removal battery. The hero 11 black is available now for $500 with GoPro subscribers getting it for 400 and the mini retails for 400 available for subscribers for 300 shipping October 25th just in time for Halloween. It's for all of your Halloween vlogs and your snowboarding Halloween snowboarding all of your your action cam needs there. So you can put in your trick or treat bag is what it is. Exactly. You can do your time lapse of all your trick or treating and then you can get that six streets out. So I have thoughts on these action cameras and just action cameras in general the Osmo action, the GoPro's. These are kind of very specific use cases and I want to know where you sit on how well they're used because sometimes I am really impressed with the the the footage that people can get with these things and other times I'm like you just strapped a camera to your helmet and didn't do anything to actually show me what anything that I want. So where do you sit on it? I'm a fan of you know when it comes to increasingly either large sensor cameras or sophisticated computational stuff like the fact that you just have like a really solid platform that's like really purpose focused of we're going to provide like the basics are like we're going to provide amazing stabilization it's going to be like everything proof and you know it's just kind of an all in one where you'd have to worry like if it falls apart I mean like I don't want to lose $329 but I'd rather lose that than like a thousand dollars if my iPhone broke or something like that or if my mirrorless camera broke you know I'd be out a similar amount of money. I'm a big fan of I do agree like there there's almost become a parody of what action cam footage will look like especially you know the you know the the more adventurous kind of stuff but the fact that it is a a pocketable like everything proof camera is really tempting and I've actually kind of come to appreciate I have a original Osmo action the one I guess retroactively now and like the stabilization on that if until I've tried it the stabilization on those is remarkable I'm assuming both of these have significantly better even then but you know it's doing that thing where it has like the it's like a 14 millimeter lens or equivalent and then it crops in a little bit and does kind of active stabilization and it really is like you're floating on a cloud when that thing is on I was doing some stuff where I clipped on the back of like a little car that my kids were you know I was pushing my kids on and like running as fast as I could in my backyard and it's just like you know it's on a gimbal so I I'm I like the fact that DJI is basically going like we're not going to mess with the formula that GoPro has put out there we tried this modular thing didn't seem like people liked it so we're going back to this this more classic design GoPro I want to be more enthusiastic the whole subscription thing though it it it kind of rubs me the wrong way how aggressively they're they're pushing it which costs 50 bucks a year gives you access to like cloud uploads and storage and stuff like that so there is some utility but I just don't like you know my pricing being subscription driven for any kind of camera I guess you know cell phones we've been living with that for a while yeah yeah yeah anything that subsidizes the camera you know exactly um I will say that as skeptical as I am about how people use these I am also the drone operator that never gets anything good is just flying around taking pictures of stuff for good you know reasons so I understand that the the the fun in it not just the utility but I really do like that DJI and GoPro are both putting out these cameras that aren't trying to be cinema cameras they are purpose built in and they stay in their lane I wish GoPro wasn't so iterative you know I I do think what they're doing with the image sensor is really interesting and being like basically we're going to give you a square sensor and like it it kind of plays up it's uh it's bona fides right it's not to your point it's not saying like it'll shoot 10 bit like okay great you can grade your GoPro footage congratulations but like you know like the fact that they're like we're not soaking up every little bit of resolution it's not so much about that it's about we can get you a really cool 4k crop that will intelligently you know use some gyroscope stuff and and level that out so when you have it on your your snowboard helmet or whatever it'll look kind of I mean I guess cinematic might be the right word but it'll look you can get a very particular look with that that's going to be very hard to do in post with any right system which I think is cool yeah and they have their own their own special post processing software to it and everything else that helps you achieve all that as well um and yeah I I really I want to see them do more I what I really want to see is the display a target when I walk in and see the the GoPro display to be able to look at the three models they show and be able to differentiate between the three of them and and what their features are so anyway it's September and that means we've got new iPhones out this year there's an even bigger difference between the standard iPhone 14 and the iPhone 14 pro models historically the pro models have gotten upgraded cameras and codex and better displays but this year it also gets a new system on a chip new so see we're talking about photography news so let's focus on the cameras the 14 pros come with a new 48 megapixel main sensor that's 65 larger than the 12 megapixel sensor on the iPhone 13 pro in casual shooting you won't notice this with apple using what it calls quad pixel to pixel bin the images down to 12 megapixels the full 48 megapixels are available when shooting in pro raw in terms of focal lengths the main camera is an f 1.78 24 millimeter equivalent the ultra wide is an f 2.2 13 millimeter equivalent and the telephoto gets all the way out there to 77 millimeter equivalent at f 2.8 for video users you can shoot in cinematic mode at 4k at either 24 or 30 frames per second there's also a new action mode that shoots at 2.8 k at 60 frames per second the crop resolution is due to extra digital stabilization actually that's really nice from what i can tell models with 256 gigabytes of storage can also shoot in pro pro res 4k at 30 frames per second although base storage models are limited to 1080p i actually had to check on that because i thought that was a typo they don't come cheap the 14 pro starts at 999 and the 14 pro max at 1099 very similar to last year's models although if you're in europe it's been increased a little bit so rich in the uk against the diminishing pound right especially that yeah um what uh what do you what do you think about this uh this quad pixel pixel binning stabilization like what do you think about this approach to a larger sensor but using less of it at a time for most purposes i think the nokia pureview has won the long game when it came to smartphone camera technology because they had this way back in like what 2012 the 70808 pureview 808 that was a phone i always wanted um yeah this makes total sense because most users are going to be posting this to instagram you don't need the resolution what you need is something that has a really smart uh dsp and a lot of processing power that can say all right we're going to take out the noisy pixels we're going to take out the you know we're going to you know evaluate what are the best pixels and produce you know provide more information for this computational photography that's you know just increasingly the standard across all cell phone platforms particularly ios it seems like um what's what's interesting to me is the continued like hey we're really pushing like i think a lot of people when the pro iPhones came out that you kind of rolled their eyes it's like okay what's really pro about them the pro raw stuff i fooled around i have a 12 pro max and the raw stuff is nice um you don't get you can't really push shadows all that much and that kind of stuff but it's it's certainly more than you can in a jpeg but when it comes to continuing that you know being able to shoot pro res video that's pretty impressive i mean that that does give you more latitude than you can even get on a lot of uh mirrorless cameras at least up until a couple of years ago when they've really started pushing you know more 10-bit stuff and that kind of stuff obviously given the size of the sensor you're still you know it's it still has its limitations but like if you're going to call it a pro that's kind of a pro feature like that is like a production feature um that you're going to be able to use and i'm assuming the 1080p thing was because you would get at 128 you probably get like 10 minutes of recording before you're you're thinking i that that i i have some thoughts that we might see something in another story on here the one thing that interesting you know the sensor is now to a size now obviously we've seen sony ship with one inch sensors in phones uh as of late um but the crop factors on these are actually not as astronomical as they they once were for these tiny little things because i think it's a on the main sensor it's a 3.5 crop considering that micro four-thirds is a 2x crop when you're talking about uh you know lens equivalencies and that kind of stuff it's not like completely out of the ballpark of what we're already kind of used to dealing with and i imagine that's why they keep the uh the telephoto f2.8 uh one obviously they need to keep the size of the lens down but i think focusing actually becomes an issue it's one thing to focus an actual six millimeter lens that's what the main camera uses like six millimeter lens everything's in focus out of once you get out of a foot so you really don't need a particularly great autofocus system with that when you get to 77 so we're talking about what uh i don't know in the teens uh like high teens when it comes to what that crop's going to be 20 20 millimeter that's like a little bit more considerable yeah when you're thinking about what you actually need to focus so i imagine stopping it down makes it a little easier yeah and something else is uh of course all these numbers the the f stop equivalent and the the focal length equivalent all these are mathematical numbers they're not physical numbers the physical numbers are way different and the math is kind of insane but they they they make it to where like they do the math in a way that makes it relatable because nobody wants a nobody wants a 1.6 millimeter equivalent at f 33 or whatever the math comes out to um but i do like the fact that and and apple isn't i i love their marketing but i always distrust it just a little bit because i know they're gonna skew it in the best way possible because they have an entire division of people that just make everything positive the pixel binning it's not actually pixel binning it's pixel combining which i think the reviews that i've seen are all looking pretty good we're getting into the winter time though and that's usually when you start seeing the iphone reviews the three months later reviews and they find the problems with the shadows and the dark areas and things like that in iphones it's just been my experience that's usually when it comes out is right before christmas time so i'm interested to see how those three month reviews end up for the iphone 14 pro and pro max but yeah i i i do think that i i i do think their approach to how they're they're what they're doing with quad pixel based on my understanding of it i am not a uh i'm not a light scientist i just i just use cameras the way that that is set up i do think that should make at least for a less noisy image now whether it's going to go too soft as a result of that i think comes down to their computational stuff which they've again if this was first gen if this was like the first time they're you know touting their computational photography bona fides uh you know maybe i'd be a little more skeptical but we've had almost what five years now of uh you know night modes and you know deep fusion and that kind of stuff so this is certainly uh i i imagine this will acquit itself decently i'm not saying it's going to perform miracles but uh i'm not i'm maybe not a little less skeptical yeah and i'm i'm just going to say this in the simplest terms possible they rearrange their photo stack for their processing so it's it's being processed by different digital filters at different you know at different points in the photo chain the digital imaging chain um i don't know how much that is going to affect the image quality but it's good to at least see them trying to give me lip service that they're improving their process so for for sure uh well if you need a little more explanation on the big tech topics like wi-fi 6 5g and more you should check out our related show know a little more to know a little more about all that more at know a little more dot com all right rich tell us what's going on with the storage since that's such a contentious thing in the phone world at uh yes yes we're limiting we're limiting our pro res resolutions based on storage and we're seeing that in the larger camera area as well and i got to set this up because we saw a really weird camera come out not just in the apsc world you know we talked about the fx 30 and uh fuji's xh2 but we also saw new high-end big boy cameras the ones i will never afford hassleblad announced its third medium format mirrorless camera the x2d 100c catchy name guys as the name suggests it ups the ante on the previous cameras that topped out at a mere 50 megapixels with a new 102 megapixel sensor matching uh what fuji does with their gfx 100 series like you would expect with a giant big sensor hassleblad also promises is some giant big dynamic range at over 15 stops with a native iso between 100 and 12800 uses a new phase attack autofocus system that's supposed to be 66 faster the last one was contrast based uses five axis ibis and includes a big 3.6 inch flip up rear display which is objectively a very big display it starts at 8199 dollars and that's before you put a lens on there now at that price and with no video capabilities clearly this is an extremely niche product we probably wouldn't do much of a discussion about it except for one key spec which i have not mentioned yet the x2d 100c has a built-in 1 terabyte ssd in addition to a single cfx card slot so you could store over 4100 megapixel raw files without ever putting in a card that's what we like to call in the business cuckoo bananas right so one terabyte lot of storage for an iphone let alone a medium format camera seems to be leading though a bit of a trend anthony and i want to get your thoughts on this ssd is increasingly becoming common camera so we've seen companies speaking of cameras i'll never afford like a offering 64 gigabytes of storage on their new m 11 obviously a big way from one terabyte but a bit of a trend it's not just internal ssds though increasingly we're seeing the utility of offering direct ssd recording i remember when the sigma fp came out a few years ago that was one of its signature features have really stood out to me as being like oh that'd be a great way to do a ton of video now the panasonic gh6 is adding support for it in firmware previously ssds you could use it in something like an atomos ninja uh but you'd be really just recording the hdmi out signal you're not recording directly from the camera and even cameras without the functionality directly might get it from third parties we've seen leaked documents show the camera accessory maker tilta plans to release a half cage enclosure for sony cameras that includes a 512 m2 ssd that connects over the camera's cf express type a slot and have enough speeds for pretty much all of your recording modes like pro res and all the weird codecs that they support there so i don't know if i'm trusting a third party like hacked ssd to record any kind of high-end cinema stuff but the hassle blood thing really caught my eye and i think one terabyte might be the outlier here for an extremely expensive camera but do you think we're going to see this as a continuing trend i've also seen a couple other cameras there was a speaking of leica there's a there's a french company called pixie i think is px pix ii that also does internal storage under camera up to i think 256 gigabytes so is this a trend and why now when we've kind of it used to be you'd get like four gigs of storage or something like that in a point and shoot or maybe your high-end cannon power shot but it's been over a decade since that's been a thing this reminds me rich go back in time with me let me set the stage it's 2006 cannon is releasing their hf line of video cameras they offer a slot for an sd card but sd cards at the time are not big enough to record everything that they want to record so they offer a model with onboard storage the onboard storage can record all the modes of the camera in full fidelity all the way up to 1080p 60 frames a second whoa mind blown now the problem with those those hard drives of course was battery life whoo it that was that was the trade-off but we had reached a point in video cameras where the portable storage solutions couldn't keep up with what the cameras could do so that was the next option and it became a premium option you could the high-end models had an option for onboard storage and then we started getting faster flash storage and that option just completely disappeared just poof gone and i wonder as we come back to today if this is the same thing we're seeing now we have cameras that are being held back by our storage options and solutions the price of external storage in the form of sd cf express uh type a type b whatever card you want to use those are getting really really high for the big you know the the major storage solutions we want we can double the cards and have a pump and have you know the things pumping out to two different cards at a time but are we reaching a gate where we just can't we can't get any any more onto the card so now we're having to do something internal or is it that storage ssd's in particular are getting cheap enough that we can just slap it in there as a gimmick i think part of it i i think it's i think it's your the first one i think that's maybe more of the cause but i also think another part of the other the other shoe for this is that the i o situation from that internal storage is in a much better state now where you can connect over usb-c you can connect over thunderbolt three on some of the depending on the camera and you can get the high so you're not going to be oh i have a one terabyte storage drive but it's going over usb-2 right or or or something is incredibly slow where it's going to be this bottleneck into your workflow when you need to get that off of there part of the benefit of using an sd card is you can take that out pop it in you can get your media off of there one way the other maybe the transfer speed to the pc or your mac or whatever like that isn't isn't still the best but then you can at least have another card in there and you can you know keep moving on with your camera i do think the i o situation on that is a big part of it and the fact that cf express is basically to what sony is doing is basically just like a pc i express lane right your base it's basically an nvme drive that you're putting into your camera so i think technically also that there the architecture is there to very seamlessly whether you want to call it an ssd where they want to call it cf express uh it's much technically easier you don't have to write a like a specific storage controller or install a different storage controller if you wanted to offer this i don't know for the ssd out stuff like like because what sigma and and what the gh6 are doing is it's usbc to a drive so i don't know that's not using the cf express slot so i i don't know if that's going to become like standard considering every camera now is shipping with usbc it would be great if that was an option especially for hey i got a i'm going to record a uh you know a game or something like that or a sporting event where i'm going to know i'm going to be there for three four hours i'm going to have a ton of video it'd be nice to just be able to have a cage throw your drive on top of that your little samsung t3 drive or whatever and just fill that thing up the whole the whole night right yeah yeah and it would and if the option was internal as well you know completely based inside the camera like how especially for stills because that's typically what you and i both shoot or are stills you're not running around with film video cameras much these days um how how much faster can i get pictures and how much faster can i clear the buffer if i have onboard storage versus the cf express type b that my cameras are like well my r5 is using i don't know but i'd be willing to to look at that and see if that would be something that would help me especially shooting sports um you know if you got r3 out there and it's shooting 200 frames in a quarter of a second or whatever craziness that is and then it locks you out for nine seconds while it writes the buffer to the card you know what can we do with that like what can what could can and do with that if they had internal storage that didn't have the interface uh limitations of the cf express type b that excites me it makes me think this could be really good well and that does raise an interesting possibility right because then because we're we're getting to the point and now i'm going to get into a weird tech tangent here because uh intel for a long time they've discontinued it now but was pushing uh something called optane which is basically like uh what was it storage class memory right just like it was kind of in between the speeds of d ram which is insanely insanely fast and and is what your your um your camera primarily writes to that's the buffer of your camera is d ram and then your storage which is your ssd or your sd card or whatever like that if they could figure out a way to integrate an ssd into your camera that had something that was you know storage class memory grade and that hassle drive is doing like 3000 megabits per second i mean it's like ever megabytes per second it is super fast it is is top end so if you could have something like that you're absolutely right you could almost create like a swap file maybe kind of situation uh where you could uh you know it maybe not be as fast as the primary buffer but prevent that really long lockout uh that really sucks when you when you when you accidentally realize you're in high burst mode and you're totally filling up your buffer yeah we've all been there the other thing is i i this could actually make me want maybe one of those weird extended grips for a camera if you put like a ssd integrated into there you just slap that on there it's like oh it's not just batteries it's actually like hey i got a terabyte now i can i can tote that around that'd be cool especially if i could strap on mvme or m.2 on there and like you know yeah that that's that's wait wait for that weird tilt a cage i i want to know who the person is that's trusting like they're like here i got my my a7 s3 i have five thousand dollars worth of glass on this i'm using this for a high end cinema production and i'm gonna use i'm gonna trust tilt has got my back on this yeah yeah 3d print a cage for yourself at that point all right if yeah actually if uh if you're like rich and you're uh deep into the world of instant film film being the key word there you might be familiar with the mint camera they've been making new cameras for fuji films instax film for a while offering tlr that shoots instax mini and range finders for the wide and square films now the company announced it's working on a premium compact 35 millimeter film camera camera prototype which hopes it will be which it hopes will be ready in about six months they're hoping to keep it priced relatively lower than what premium compacts go for on the used market good luck on that for example contacts point and shoots can go for over two thousand dollars it's shared a few sample images and some of them show a resemblance to the classic rolay 35 camera but is too early to say much more and rich i know you have a quick thought on this one i do there have been a number of like crowd sourced attempts to do 35 millimeter like new 35 millimeter cameras and the problem is like the reason mince able to do instant cameras really well instant cameras are big the film is big so you don't need like quite as fine manufacturing for a lot of parts you can get away with a lot of bigger things makes it easier to manufacture the the miniaturization this like the whole industry that made 35 millimeter cameras possible basically doesn't exist anymore so it's not something you can just 3d print it's not you know you you have to invest a lot in some very very fine parts for this now mint has a history of doing this we can if you want to know who to blame for the rise of a super expensive context cameras thank you the kardashians they've made it a fashion accessory and also these cameras have tons of electronics so they break all the time like you're like two seconds away from those cameras breaking all that beautiful cameras beautiful lenses i have a roly 35 it's my second favorite camera of all time it's a beautiful like little timepiece german piece of engineering so if they can rip off roly please please rip them off make this beautiful little camera and you could probably charge high hundreds sub i think it has to be sub thousand for it to take off from the market but anywhere from six to eight hundred people would pay for it if it had a decent if it had a decent lens this is all to say it has a decent lens right you know all of these all these cameras i'm talking about the roly the context of the olive zeiss glass t-star glass i have no idea if they can talk to zeiss about making that probably not but if they get a good lens on there the price is right there's a there's definitely a market for it so i am excited for that there's a whole lot of e f glass out there really really good on the standards that you might be able to get away with there is a company called i think we've talked about on the show called umar lenses that basically takes old point and shoot cameras old basically rehouses lenses on like an industrial scale uh so hey talk to omar maybe you can get some cool vintage stuff you can throw in your weird roly ripoff camera mince get on it all right and of course we'd love to hear from you let us know what photo news stories we missed or tell us what you think of this new format feedback at daily tech news show dot com with this subject photo news monthly remember to catch daily tech news show it's live monday through friday at four p.m eastern twenty hundred utc find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live we'll see you next month i hope you have enjoyed this program