Camera kicks off 2016 with a bumper crop of test reports featuring the cameras that are making headlines at the moment, including Leica’s brand new professional mirrorless system, Panasonic’s Lumix GX8 and Canon’s PowerShot G3X.
I RECENTLY ROAD-TESTED Phase One’s new XF medium format D-SLR for sister publication ProPhoto – and it revealed a number of interesting talking points. For starters, the XF is the first new ‘clean sheet’ medium format SLR camera system since Hasselblad’s H1 back in 2002, so it represents a significant vote of confidence from Phase One in the future of digital medium format photography. The investment in both time and money will have been substantial. Now, of course, Phase One has a lot invested in digital medium format (even more now that it has just purchased the remainding parts of Mamiya that it didn’t already own), but it wasn’t so long ago that the outlook for this category was looking a bit bleak. It’s hard to determine when digital medium…
THEY’RE A BUSY bunch over at Leica at the moment, and the latest new product announcement is a new version of the digital M rangefinder camera which, the company says, “stands for the M-Philosophy in its purest form”. The new M Typ 262 is built around Leica’s philosophy of “Das Wesentliche, which translates as “the essential” and means, in this case, a camera stripped of a number of features, mostly notably video recording and live view. The idea of removing live view is that you have to use the Typ 262’s optical viewfinder which is, after all, the essence of a classic rangefinder camera. The elimination of these features allows for a simpler menu – now comprising just two pages – and what was the live view button now provides…
Nikon has announced that it is developing the D5 pro-level D-SLR, but has provided no further information at this point. The launch date could be any time from now to this year’s Photokina in September, but the company made much the same announcement with the current D4S – which then promptly appeared almost immediately after. However, it’s also interesting that Nikon is ‘admitting’ to having a new top-end D-SLR when the rumours are gathering about the likelihood of it launching a pro-level mirrorless camera any time now. Watch this space.…
HOW OFTEN HAVE you looked at an image and not been happy with the focusing? It could be you or it could be the AF system, but either way, something important isn’t in focus. With Panasonic’s new ‘Post Focus’ mode you’ll be able to fix the problem by selecting a different focus point after a shot has been taken. You can’t actually alter the focus of an individual frame, but in the ‘Post Focus’ mode, all the possible focus points – as determined by the AF system – from foreground to background are captured in a high-speed sequence of frames and you can subsequently select the one with the desired plane of focus. In fact, you simply touch – on the monitor screen – the subject matter in the image…
IT’S GROWN INTO the world’s biggest international competition for sports and action photography, attracting a huge variety of truly remarkable images. Held every three years, the Red Bull Illume Image Quest is on again, and you have until 31 March to submit your entries. The 2013 competition attracted a total of 28,257 images from 6417 photographers representing 124 countries and was won by German photographer, Lorenz Holder, for his remarkable picture of snowboarder Xaver Hoffmann photographed next to a giant satellite dish. In 2016 entries are invited in 11 categories – Close Up, Energy, Enhance, Lifestyle, Masterpiece by Yodobashi, New Creativity, Playground, Sequence by Sony, Spirit, Wings and Mobile. The Mobile category is new for this year and recognises the rise in the use of smartphone and tablet photography. Photographers…
CANON SAYS IT has listened to the demands of professional photographers and designed an A2 format photo printer that’s compact enough to fit on a desktop. The new Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000 ticks a lot of boxes for pros and enthusiast-level shooters, and slots between the top-of-the-range PIXMA model, the PRO-1, and the floor-standing large format imagePROGRAF models. It employs a newly-developed pigmented inkset called Lucia PRO, which comprises 12 colours to give an extended colour gamut and smoother gradations. Canon states that the PRO-1000’s increased colour gamut represents 110 percent of the PRO-1’s on lustre or gloss paper and 119 percent on matte papers. The Lucia PRO inkset comprises Photo Black and Matte Black – using separate channels – plus Grey and Photo Grey to give enhanced B&W printing. It…
