Nikon Blog
Why Shoot Large Format Film in a Digital World?
For the past year or so, my main camera for landscape photography hasn’t been one of the newest high-resolution mirrorless cameras that I spend so much time writing about. Nor has it been an ol’ reliable DSLR. Instead, I’ve been using large format film, especially a 4×5 camera. When other photographers see the camera, they usually say something like “Wow, old-school!” But that’s only partly correct. On one hand, 4×5 cameras are the definition of old-school photographic technology. They’ve existed in some form since about the 1830s. Yet...
read moreXiaomi unveils its new 12 Series flagship smartphones with 50MP triple camera array, 120W charging
Xiaomi has unveiled its latest flagship smartphones, the Xiaomi 12 and Xiaomi 12 Pro. While the smartphones are currently exclusive to China, limiting their appeal to a worldwide audience, the phones are worth discussing because the features are quite interesting and may hint at what customers in the US and Europe can expect from future international Xiaomi models. The Xiaomi 12 series phones are powered by the latest Snapdragon 8 chips, feature impressive OLED panels, some interesting camera specs, and features, and very fast 120W charging...
read moreViltrox unveils $469 13mm F1.4 AF lens for Fujifilm X-mount cameras
Optics and accessory manufacturer Viltrox has announced a new 13mm F1.4 autofocus lens for Fujifilm X-mount camera systems. The lens, which offers a roughly 20mm full-frame equivalent focal length, is expected to ship in February. The Viltrox 13mm F1.4 AF is constructed of 14 elements in 11 groups. It has a minimum focusing distance of 22cm (8.7”), uses a stepping motor (STM) to drive the internal focusing mechanism, features a nine-blade aperture diaphragm and uses a 67mm front filter thread. As for measurements, the lens comes in at 74mm...
read moreSamyang sneakily shares its first teaser for a forthcoming 135mm F1.8 lens for Sony E-mount cameras
Note the size of the 135mm F1.8 lens (center, no red ring) compared to Samyang’s AF 24-70mm F2.8 lens for Sony E-mount cameras. To celebrate the turn of the new year, optics manufacturer Samyang published a video showcasing a collection of its lenses followed by a brief display of digital fireworks. While it might seem like your usual marketing post to ring in the new year, it turns out Samyang snuck in a little teaser for a forthcoming lens. Although not nearly as clear as the ‘135 / 1.8 FE’ test, it appears that...
read moreNikon Z 24-70mm F2.8 S field review
Introduction Nikon’s Nikkor Z 24-70mm F2.8 S is a fast standard zoom lens for the company’s Z-mount mirrorless cameras. With a focal range of 24-70mm on FX-format bodies or 36-105mm equivalent on DX-format bodies, it’s well-suited to everything from landscapes and street photography to portraits, weddings and event photography. It can also serve double-duty as an impromptu macro lens in a pinch and is quite well-suited to video capture, making it a pretty versatile all-rounder. Available since April 2019, list pricing is set...
read moreLiving Within Your Dynamic Range
One of the quieter revolutions in digital image quality has been dynamic range. The days of picking between highlight detail and shadow detail are gone; almost any modern camera can capture both simultaneously with ease. But even though this capability is remarkable, it’s also easy to overuse. Unnecessarily Expanding Your Dynamic Range Most HDR photos I see don’t need to be HDR. You know the ones. The sky is darker than the foreground, and everything floats in the image with unnatural glowing colors. The entire scene looks flat somehow. The...
read moreDPReview TV: Which Camera Will Survive? Sony a1, Nikon Z9 and Canon R3
[embedded content] A plane crash leaves the mirrorless flagships overexposed to the dynamic range of elements. Will Canon, Nikon & Sony come to their sensors and group together to weather the aberrations ahead, or will they cannibalize one another? Watch this week’s episode with Chris and Jordan to find out! Subscribe to our YouTube channel to get new episodes of DPReview TV every week. Gear in this story Senior Editor Barnaby Britton is a fan of extreme low-light imaging – something that the Nikon Z9 makes easy. Click through...
read morePSA: GNARBOX seems to be gone, leaving would-be GNARBOX customers out in the cold
PetaPixel is reporting that GNARBOX appears to be dead. The GNARBOX 2.0 SSD launched on Kickstarter in 2018 and let users back up photos and videos in the field, review and rough-cut footage, cull and edit images, show selects and more. It’s more than a portable hard drive. Or, at least, it was. The company has apparently gone dark, which leaves existing customers looking for support — and the required app — in the lurch. Without the app, which has been removed from the App Store, new customers can’t actually use all the features...
read more2021 in review: The biggest photo news stories of the year
At the end of last year, 2021 felt as though it could represent a fresh start after a tumultuous year that saw COVID-19 impact nearly every facet of our lives (and the photography industry). As it turns out, despite the widespread availability of safe vaccines (in much if not all of the world), not much was different in 2021. Between the numerous COVID-19 variants, supply chain constraints and the global chip shortage, 2021 almost seems to blur together with 2020. Still, many new products were announced and even if some were delayed, much...
read moreThis LOFAR ‘video’ may have helped researchers discover how lightning forms
Lightning is a widespread atmospheric event. Per the Met Office in the UK, there are three million flashes of lightning every day on Earth, or about 44 strikes per second. Despite this, scientists haven’t been able to conclude how exactly lightning forms inside a thundercloud. That could be changing though, with the help of new video recorded by a team of researchers. In 2018, a very important lightning bolt flashed overhead the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope array in the Netherlands. These telescopes made detailed...
read moreReply to Happy new year 2022
Hello all , I just bought a 5DSr body and a sigma 60-600 S lens and have taken about 40 pictures without problems – this evening I was taking of a kingfisher bird and the auto focus stopped working and now I can’t seem to get it to take a picture on any setting I have tried everything – plenty battery life still – on / off / lens off and on ……. Just cannot get it to work and starting to worry , lens and body brand new Hugo in Zambia Hello all , I just bought a 5DSr body and a sigma 60-600 S lens and have taken about 40...
read moreDarktable 3.8.0 adds support for Canon’s CR3 Raw files, adds external controller support and more
Darktable 3.8.0 is now available. The latest version of the open-source photography workflow application and RAW developer adds new features, UI improvements, editing tools, improved file support and more. The list of additions and changes is lengthy, so we’ll only be discussing the highlights in this news article. If you’d like more information about the latest Github release, click here. The keyboard shortcut system has been reworked in version 3.8.0. You can now control darktable with external devices, such as MIDI devices and...
read moreHappy new year 2022
Photos Members Group Since Happy new year 2022 Hugo Firx says: Hello all , I just bought a 5DSr body and a sigma 60-600 S lens and have taken about 40 pictures without problems – this evening I was taking of a kingfisher bird and the auto focus stopped working and now I can’t seem to get it to take a picture on any setting I have tried everything – plenty battery life still – on / off / lens off and on ……. Just cannot get it to work and starting to worry , lens and body brand new Hugo in Zambia 15 hours ago (permalink)...
read moreVideo: ‘Landscapes of Change’ beautifully showcases the changing of seasons from an aerial perspective
[embedded content] You may have heard the classic Crowded House song ‘Four Seasons In One Day.’ Now, there is a video that displays the changing of all four seasons through a brilliant series of transitions. Using a Mavic 2 Pro and third-party app Litchi, Arvids Baranovs chose about 30 distinctive locations in Latvia—from winding rivers to National Parks—and put his aerial hyperlapse skills to use so he could illustrate the changing of seasons. ‘The change of seasons is such a self-evident phenomenon that we take it for...
read moreViltrox’s new $199 EF- to E-mount ‘smart adapter’ has built-in OLED display, full AF/EXIF support and more
Accessory and optics manufacturer Viltrox has announced a new Canon EF- to Sony E-mount adapter with a built-in OLED display, full autofocus support and EXIF data transfer capabilities. The EF-E5 Smart Mount Adapter, as Viltrox refers to it, is a fifth-generation adapter that improves upon its predecessors with new features as well as a built-in OLED display that shows the focal length, aperture and focus mode of the attached lens. The adapter supports full autofocus capabilities of EF lenses on Sony E-mount cameras, with a clever dial on the...
read moreTTartisan’s 90mm F1.25 lens is now available for five new camera mounts, costs $435
TTartisan is bringing its 90mm F1.25 lens, previously only available for Leica M mount cameras, to five other lens mounts. Now, the ultrafast prime will be available for Canon RF, Fujifilm GFX, Leica L, Nikon Z and Sony E mount camera systems. As with the M-mount version, all five versions for other mounts are constructed of 11 elements in seven groups, including two high-refractive elements. Other features include a 77mm front filter thread, a 10-blade aperture diaphragm, an aperture range of F1.25 through F16, a clicked aperture ring and it...
read moreDPReview TV: Cheap Camera Challenge
Published Dec 29, 2021 | dpreview staff [embedded content] In this week’s episode, Chris and Jordan head to The Camera Store to buy the cheapest digital stills and video cameras they can find, and challenge themselves to shoot an entire episode with what they end up with. One of them has a better time with this experiment than the other… Subscribe to our YouTube channel to get new episodes of DPReview TV every week. Gear in this story While film nostalgia reaches an all-time high, Seattle-based pro photographer Sofi Lee is turning...
read moreHands-on with Nikon Nikkor Z 100-400mm F4.5-5.6 VR S
Rishi Sanyal Though we haven’t tested the Z9’s accuracy of Eye AF, we generally found that Nikon’s Eye AF (Z7/II, recent firmware) was: The most eager to find eyes/faces in a scene, leading to many false positives Tended to front-focus. We surmise Nikon’s machine learning-based approach was trained in a looser manner, with less stringent criteria. Sony/Canon are conservative but with fewer false positives. WIth the Z9, though, things have advanced considerably. It is able to identify faces / eyes in the scene far...
read moreUpdate: Canon CEO confirms the 1DX Mark III will be the company’s last flagship DSLR
Update (Tuesday, December 28): Canon provided a statement to DPReview regarding Fujio Mitarai’s comment. We have added it to the bottom of the article. In an interview with the Yomiuri Shimbun, a major newspaper in Japan, Canon CEO, President and Chairman, Fujio Mitarai, confirmed the EOS-1D X Mark III will be the company’s last flagship DSLR camera as the company continues its transition to mirrorless systems. The interview, which was first spotted by Y.M.Cinema Magazine, was part of a longer article regarding the overall state of the...
read moreLost in space: Astronomers discover up to 170 rogue planets
Lead image: An artist’s interpretation of a rogue planet with the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex in the background. Credit: Bordeaux University / ESO. A team of astronomers have discovered at least 70 new rogue planets. There may even be up to 170 rogue, or free-floating planets (FFPs). It’s the largest group of rogue planets discovered at once. The new study outlining the research has been published in Nature Astronomy. The first author, Núria Miret-Roig, is an astronomer at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux, France...
read moreVenus Optics releases $799 Laowa Argus 45mm F0.95 lens for full-frame mirrorless cameras
Venus Optics has released the Laowa Argus 45mm F0.95 FF, its latest full-frame lens in its growing Argus series that also includes its Argus 35mm F0.95 FF and Argus 33mm F0.95 CF APO lenses. The 45mm manual lens is constructed of 13 elements in nine groups, including one aspherical element, one extra-low dispersion element and three utra-high-refractive index elements. If features a 15-blade aperture diaphragm, has an aperture range of F0.95 through F16, uses a 72mm front filter thread and has a minimum focusing distance of 50cm (19.7”)....
read moreGear of the Year 2021: Chris’ choice – Wotancraft Pilot 10L shoulder bag
To call 2021 an innovative year for the camera industry is an understatement. Now, you could point out that 2021 was a year of relatively few product releases, hampered by numerous supply chain issues, and you’d be correct. However, what the industry lacked in quantity, it certainly made up for with quality. The Nikon Z9 became not only the first Nikon flagship camera to rely on an electronic shutter, but also took DPReview’s ‘Product of the Year’ award. Canon revived its Eye-Control autofocus, with a completely...
read moreTamron warns its 20mm, 24mm and 35mm F2.8 primes have AF issues with Sony a7 IV cameras
Optics manufacturer Tamron has issued a product advisory informing consumers that three of its E-mount prime lenses suffer issues that prevent them from using autofocus when shooting videos on Sony a7 IV camera systems. The announcement, published by Tamron Japan, says the company has confirmed its 20mm, 24mm and 35mm F2.8 Di III OSD M1:2 lenses, released in 2019, have an autofocus issue when paired with Sony’s full-frame a7 IV camera system that causes the lenses to switch from ‘AF’ to ‘MF’ when shooting movies. Tamron suggests it isn’t sure...
read moreHands-on with Nikon Nikkor Z 24-120mm F4 S
peripheralfocus @ skyrunr Used values have no relevance whatsoever to Nikon and therefore don’t influence their decisions about what to make and market even one iota. The OP asked why Nikon made the 24-70/4. I answered. @ SnapHappy32 You seem to think I said that all consumers want the lowest price and don’t care about anything else. I did not say anything close to that. I said price is the strongest factor (among many) in driving buying decisions for the vast majority of consumer goods. That’s why Apple offers computers and...
read moreA beginner’s guide to memory cards
Introduction to memory cards, and main types Photograph by Terry Sullivan When it comes to understanding how a digital image is created, the focus is most often placed on a camera’s lens and image sensor, which makes sense, since these two components have the greatest impact on image quality. But once the image or video is captured, it will need to be stored somewhere on the device. Today, the location of where an image or video file is stored differs depending on the device. For instance, if you’ve captured a photo on a phone or tablet,...
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Started out doing photography at the age of 6 using an uncle's old 1940 kodak brownie box camera. At 15 years of age, I decided to buy my very own 1975 Praktica SLR camera. I now shoot with a Nikon D850. I do unpaid TFP and commercial paid work.