Even though we're only halfway through 2024, it has felt like a very busy year for the camera industry. This week, the PetaPixel Podcast team is joined by Camera Labs' Gordon Laing to give a midterm grade to every camera maker.
For photographers who were around during the emergence of the DSLR, few cameras are as influential or recognizable as early Canon EOS Digital Rebel models. Gordon Laing of Cameralabs has turned back the clock to look at the very first Rebel DSLR in his latest Retro Review.
As part of his retrospective Retro Review series, Gordon Laing of Cameralabs is looking at a very special Sony camera -- the Cyber-shot R1. 19 years ago, it became the first camera Laing published on Cameralabs.
Last August, Gordon Laing of Camera Labs looked at one of his favorite vintage digital cameras, the Sony Cyber-shot F707. Now Laing looks at its successor, 2002's Sony Cyber-shot F717.
As Gordon Laing of Camera Labs continues to work on his excellent "Retro Review" series, he took a break to look at an older camera that doesn't quite reach retro status, the Nikon D80, calling it the "best camera under $100."
Gordon Laing of Camera Labs has returned with a new episode of his excellent "Retro Review" series, taking photographers on a nostalgic stroll down memory lane. This time, Laing has reviewed the Canon EOS D30, the company's first DSLR built from the ground up in-house.
The Canon PowerShot Pro70's SLR-style appearance may not seem out of the ordinary now, but when it hit store shelves in 1998, it represented a significant departure for Canon. Photographer and vintage digital camera enthusiast Gordon Laing of Camera Labs has tested the influential Pro70 in the latest edition of Laing's excellent "Retro Review" series.
The latest vintage digital camera to get Gordon Laing's fantastic "Retro Review" treatment is 2001's Sony Cyber-shot F707 camera. The L-shaped 5-megapixel camera was sold as a premium all-in-one compact.
In his latest Retro Review, Gordon Laing of Camera Labs takes photographers back to 1996 when Olympus launched its Camedia consumer camera series with a trio of digital cameras, the C-400, C-400L, and Laing's focus, the highest-end C-800L.
Released nearly three decades ago in 1994, the QuickTake 100 was Apple's first digital camera and among the very first digital cameras available to general consumers. But as much of an impact as it had back then, it hasn't aged well.
Photographer Gordon Laing of Camera Labs is back with another edition of his retrospective "Retro Review" video series. This time, Laing focuses on the Sony Cyber-shot DSC F505, a consumer-oriented digital camera released 24 years ago.
Photographer Gordon Laing is back with a new edition of Dino Bytes, the series where he revisits classic cameras from decades past. This time he's dusting off the 23-year-old Nikon D1, the company's first DSLR.
Photographer Gordon Laing from Camera Labs and Dino Bytes has released a special episode dedicated to one of the strangest digital cameras released in the 90s - The Nintendo Game Boy Camera.
Gordon Laing from Camera Labs and Dino Bytes takes a look at the Sony Cyber-shot P1 to see how it has held up over the more than two decades since it was first introduced.
Photographer Gordon Laing has been digging through his archives and revisiting classic digital cameras. His latest entry takes a look at the Olympus CAMEDIA C-2000 Z, a camera that was originally released 23 years ago.
Henri Cartier-Bresson is famously credited with the saying, "Your First 10,000 photos are your worst." Looking back at his first photos, photographer Gordon Laing tends to agree.
The Canon PowerShot Pro1 was released almost 18 years ago and is seen as a "bridge camera" between a point and shoot and DSLR, but cost about the same as the latter. Unable to balance price versus features, it would be the last of its kind.
Photographer Gordon Laing recently dusted off his old Nikon Coolpix 300 to see how well it has aged. Originally launched in 1996, it could shoot 0.3-megapixel photos and offered the unusual ability to take notes or draw with the touchscreen.
Sigma today announced its new 18-50mm /f2.8 DC DN lens -- a small zoom lens for mirrorless cameras with APS-C sensors -- and photographer Gordon Laing decided to see how it compared to Sony's 16-50 f/3.5-5.6 kit lens.
Back in the mid to late 1990s, digital cameras had a storage problem: they either used expensive memory cards or built-in memory with limited capacity and awkward cables.
For me, the year 2000 was when digital cameras really started to become useful. A wealth of cameras arrived sporting Sony’s latest 3 megapixel CCD sensor at a sub-$1,000 price, with enough resolution to make 7x5-inch prints and more than enough for online use.
After months of teasing, Canon finally let me get my hands onto a pre-production EOS R3 for a few days, during which time I tried every test I could think of.
21 years ago Canon put everything it could think of into a compact camera aimed at enthusiasts who couldn’t stretch to a DSLR or simply wanted something more portable. The result was the PowerShot G1, launched towards the end of the year 2000, costing $1,100, and the first in an enormously popular series that’s still going strong to this day.
Camera Labs' Gordon Laing was given the opportunity to test the two largest and most expensive lenses for Canon's mirrorless RF system -- the Canon RF400mm f/2.8L and the Canon RF600mm f/4L -- and has evaluated how they stack up in stills and video tests.
The COOLPIX 100 was Nikon’s first consumer digital camera. It launched in 1996 at around $500 and sports a one-third-megapixel sensor, a fixed 52mm equivalent lens, and one megabyte of memory.
Launched in 2001, the Pro90 IS was Canon’s flagship PowerShot and shared a similar external design to the earlier Pro70 from 1998 but greatly boosted its zoom capability from 2.5x to 10x. It became Canon’s first digital camera with optical image stabilization as well.
The Canon EOS R3 has been one of the most discussed cameras of the year, but until this point, it appeared to only exist on paper, in renders, and in the minds of Canon engineers -- but not anymore. In a video published by Gordon Laing, he shows that the camera is indeed real and not just vaporware.
In 1998, Nikon launched the COOLPIX 900, the company’s third digital camera but arguably its first designed with photographers in mind. The previous COOLPIX 100 and 300 may have had the honor of being Nikon’s first digital cameras, but those 1997 models were firmly in the computer peripheral camp.
Canon’s first consumer digital camera was the PowerShot 600, which launched in 1996 and sports a fixed 50mm equivalent lens, half a megapixel of resolution, and a surprisingly large body. It cost just shy of a grand at the time and was the debut of the PowerShot series.
Back in 1996, Sony launched its first consumer digital camera, the DSC-F1. It had one-third of a Megapixel, four megabytes of built-in memory, a 1.8-inch screen, and a lens housing that could rotate 180 degrees for comfortable waist-level shooting or selfies.