My take on this lens:
It’s a much more interesting lens than the 24-50mm f/2.8 G announced a month ago. This new 16-25mm G lens makes sense because:
First of all it’s almost half the price of the 16-35mm GM.
It’s much lighter and compact (perfect for gimbal shooters, vloggers and travel photographers)
And if you think about it…most of us do own a 24-70mm GM lens and you will not miss the 35mm focal length anyway.
One more news: Today Sony Japan also announced that reorders were much higher than expected:
Orders for the FE 24-50mm F2.8 G “SEL2450G” for digital single-lens camera α [E mount], which we started accepting orders for from Thursday, February 29, 2024, have far exceeded our expectations. , it may take some time for the product to be delivered.
We are currently working hard to respond to customer requests as much as possible, so we appreciate your patience.
Beaverlab Excope DT1 remotely catches the distant moment with your smartphone.
Excope DT1 is an lightweight innovative optical device that combines leading-edge optics and high-performance digital technology with ultra-telephoto lens. You capture distant subject, edit images and share the screen with your friends through a smartphone. You’ll take photos in ways like never before.
Excope DT1 gives you an eagle’s eye view of infinite distance. Observe lunar craters, photograph delicate birds, and record the activities of dangerous wildlife – all from thousands of miles away that would otherwise be out of reach. Featuring a 400mm focal length lens, Excope DT1 magnifies distant objects up to 200 times to present them on your phone screen.
On the show floor at NAB 2024, we stopped by Blackmagic Design’s booth to learn more about their upcoming URSA Cine 17K from Business Development Manager Stuart Ashton. The camera is still under development and won’t start shipping before the end of this year, but we could still get an idea of what is all about. Let’s take a look!
I am impressed Blackmagic did this kind of effort. it might force the hand of the big guys like Sony to also make truly large sensor “affordable” cameras!
Dpreview had a chat with Sigma CEO Yamaki. They main topic was the Full Frame Foveons sensor development. Yamaki stated that:
Unfortunately, we have not made any significant progress since last year.
So it will still take a couple of years before (if ever) we will see a real camera using this kind of sensor. For Yamaki the upsides of this sensor (like color accuracy) are worth the effort and struggle to develop this technology.
Topaz just released the brand new Photo Ai 3.0 (Click here). I use this software a lot and I think it does an impressive job. The updates are really big too!
Press text:
Photo AI’s creative potential has been unlocked in this version, allowing the creation of your own workflows for the first time with presets, flexible ordering of enhancements, panel docking & collapsing, enabling RAW color and lighting adjustments, and a standardized Topaz UI across all of our applications.
Presets
Save your commonly used filter combinations into a single stack, including the filter settings and selections. Presets will then appear in the enhancement menu so that you can reuse your favorite settings and selections across any of your photos with a single click. This will speed up the process of editing large batches of hundreds or thousands of photos at a time. You can also delete old presets by hovering over them in the enhancement menu.
Docking & Collapsing
You can now dock the floating control panel on the right side of the viewport for easy access, or undock it and move it to where you need on top of your working preview area.
The right panel is also now collapsible, making more space for viewing your image while editing. For maximum space, try undocking the control panel while in collapsible mode.
Reordering
You can now re-order and combine your enhancements in any order on the right panel, allowing you to more dynamically chain effects together. For example, you can now sharpen the entire image first before denoising the background and then sharpening again with just the subject. Changing the order of the filters will affect the way the output is processed, and this freedom will allow you to achieve results that otherwise were not possible within Photo AI.
RAW Balance Color & Adjust Lighting
On top of RAW Denoise, you are now able to adjust the color balance and lighting for RAW files inside Topaz Photo AI using our AI-based filters. This allows you to get the best quality possible out of your image straight from the camera and inside the application without having to make these adjustments in an external application even for RAW files.
Other Updates
On top of these exciting updates, both Face Recovery and Preserve Text can now be applied to the image multiple times, allowing you to control the strength of the effect on different subjects and areas of the image independently. We have also added other performance improvements and fixes under the hood. Take a look at the full changelog for more.
UI Refresh
Topaz Photo AI has been updated with a standardized Topaz UI framework, with new colors and icons coming to Topaz Labs apps for a unified, streamlined look.
Changelog
Refreshed user interface with Topaz UI style
Implemented drag and reorder enhancements
Implemented basic preset functionality
Implemented docking and undocking feature
Enabled Text Recovery to be added multiple times
Enabled Face Recovery to be added multiple times
Enabled Adjust lighting for RAW images
Enabled Balance color for RAW images
Fixed Adjust lighting crash on M3 with macOS 14.4 and above
Fixed switching models on Denoise not updating the preview
Fixed export output suffix not matching enhancements order
