Leica’s Leitz Phone 1: Why Aren’t More Camera Companies Making Phones?
Put a Type-1 image sensor in a phone and things are bound to get interesting, especially when Leica is involved. So, what’s next for the company’s presence in the mobile space?
Put a Type-1 image sensor in a phone and things are bound to get interesting, especially when Leica is involved. So, what’s next for the company’s presence in the mobile space?
Colombian pop star Shakira posted a video to her Instagram last week of her shocked reaction to a phone camera 20 years ago that underlines how far lens technology has progressed.
Let's consider a situation. You went out for a photo shoot with your trusty camera or phone. On location, all the photos looked sharp on the small screen and when you returned to base and opened the photos on your computer you found some photos had missed focus. Worse in some photos the entire image seemed shaken and out of focus.
When the Z mirrorless system was first announced, Nikon swore to deliver lenses with far superior image quality and optical characteristics when compared to the DSLR F-mount siblings, and it all started with the Nikon Z 24-70mm f/2.8 S lens. Despite how good the f/4 "kit" version performed compared to the F-mount version, the $2,295 24-70mm f/2.8 S lens might be one of the best 24-70mm lenses ever made.
Leica is launching its own smartphone --the Leitz Phone 1 -- that will be exclusively available through Softbank in Japan when it becomes available in Japan. While it's a Leica phone, it shares the same guts as the Aquos R6, a smartphone that boasts a 1-inch sensor camera that Sharp announced in partnership with Leica in May.
Sharp has just announced the Aquos R6 smartphone with a large Leica-branded lens and huge 1-inch sensor, a first for a traditional handset manufacturer.
Last week, Nikon Japan moved the legendary NIKKOR AF-S 200mm f/2G ED VR II lens over into its 'Old Product' list of discontinued F-Mount lenses. And while Nikon USA won't confirm the news, this probably means that the old lens is no longer in production, and will hopefully be replaced in the near future.
Roger Cicala at LensRentals is on a quest. A quest to MTF everything that moves... or in this case zooms. After putting off zoom lens comparisons as long as possible, Roger finally bit the bullet and published his 70-200mm f/2.8 MTF chart comparison.
I’ll own up to this and say that I’m guilty of being stuck in my ways. But age is no excuse for not being as adaptive as I should be to the changing times. But let me explain.
During the be beginning of the year, Sharp Corporation unveiled a surprising, small handheld Micro Four Thirds 8K camera – but back then we had very few details about it. Now, just before NAB 2019 is about to begin, we had the opportunity to talk to Kaino-san from Sharp, who was kind enough to answer our questions and also let us have a short spin with it.
No one saw this one coming: the Japanese electronics company Sharp is teasing what may become the world's most affordable 8K Micro Four Thirds mirrorless camera. It will reportedly break ground as a prosumer camera that costs less than $5,000.
Want to learn how to shoot tack-sharp landscape photos? Photographer Dave Morrow made this solid 27-minute guide that teaches his personal focusing strategy. He believes it's the "most in-depth guide to back button focus and hyperfocal distance currently on YouTube."
Sigma is undoubtedly, tantalizingly on fire. Their Art series lenses consistently undercut and outperform the competition, as they proved yet again by manufacturing an 85mm f/1.4 lens that is not only $600 cheaper than Sony's top-of-the-line 85mm GM, but according to DPReview, it's better 'across the board.'
If you want sharp black and white images with fine grain, then you've come to the right place!
Our friend Roger Cicala over at LensRentals recently put the highly-praised Nikon 105mm f/1.4 through its paces, and it seems the world's fastest 105mm lens may also be the world's sharpest f/1.4 lens. MTF charts don't lie.
Photographer and videographer Michael Shainblum just released some 100% unedited 4K test footage and first thoughts from/about the DJI Mavic Pro, and it's (to use the technical term) freaking gorgeous. So why does half the Internet think the Mavic Pro has a low quality camera?
This is a big week for new top-tier gear at DxOMark. First, they crowned the Canon 1D X Mark II the best Canon sensor they've ever tested, and now the affordable Sigma 30mm f/1.4 DC DN Contemporary has been named DxO's top-ranking Sony E-Mount prime.
The Jupiter 21M is the real deal... assuming you have the biceps to wield it. A 200mm f/4 lens from the Soviet era, it captures exquisite details and will only set you back between $30 and $100 on eBay.
Cheap lens aficionado Mathieu Stern just released this 2-minute video review of the Minolta MD Rokkor-X 45mm f/2 lens.
A few months ago, photographer Adam Flor and I embarked on a sweet project. The goal was to shoot items using different colored backgrounds and use focus stacking to get full sharpness while shooting with a shallow depth of field.
The process was kinda nuts, but after seeing how it was done it wasn’t so bad. First, we grabbed small household items that had tiny details to them.
Sharp may not be the most popular kid on the block when it comes to smartphone manufacturers, but the company is working hard to offer features that other phones don't have. For its latest Aquos smartphones, Sharp has added 2,100fps slow-motion playback. It's being called the world's highest-rate super slow motion playback for smartphones.
These days, it seems that if you want to get a nice sharp lens, you have to spend $1000 on a piece of L glass. Aside from the nifty fifty’s of the world, there are very few lenses that deliver quality results at a low price. But if you look harder, there are actually a few old lenses that still offer amazing quality for extremely low price. How is that possible? Well, it is. Keep reading to learn how.
Matt Granger, one of our favorite photographers/photography educators, was one of the fortunate souls who got to spend the last 4 months putting the newly announced ZEISS Otus 85mm f/1.4 through its paces, and he's created a video review to show you just why this lens is worth every penny of the $4,490 asking price.
Besides sensor size, quality glass is the other major hurdle that smartphones need to overcome if they ever want to truly compete, quality-wise, with their bigger more capable brothers.
But since attaching a 500mm lens to a smartphone looks... well... kind of dumb, the folks at Canadian startup Algolux are taking a software-based approach and producing some truly incredible results in the process.
For landscape photographers, getting your entire scene in focus while keeping things as sharp as possible at the same time can be a challenge.
But if you follow the simple technique laid out by photographer Joshua Cripps in the tutorial above, as he puts it, it becomes "as easy as manually removing a corn syrup-based artificially-flavored confectionary product, from the infantile grasp of a newborn Homo sapien."
I’m probably setting myself up for a replay of the Exo Tria Arxidia scene, but my friend Bernhard introduced me to the German term scharf the other day. It can mean both sharp and hot (as in spicy, or as in, you know, hot). After testing our first copies of the Zeiss 55mm f/1.4 Otus lens I felt the term scharf was just perfect to describe this lens.
Last week, we wrote about an emerging digital camera feature called "focus peaking", which lets users easily focus lenses through live view by using colorful pixels to highlight in-focus areas. Photographer Karel Donk wanted the same feature in Photoshop, which doesn't currently offer it, so he decided to create it himself.
If you recently upgraded from a compact camera to a DSLR, one of the first things you …
“Super-Resolution From a Single Image” is an interesting research page by computer scientists …
A new Nikon patent unearthed by Egami shows that the company has developed …