CIPA reports an astonishing minus 35% in system camera shipments for February 2019

Buckle up dear readers: In February 2019 Japanese camera companies did ship 35% less cameras compared to February 2018. This is much worse than I would have expected. If that trend continues expect some companies to complete drop out of the camera business!

This is worrisome if you consider Nikon and Canon just launched their new systems and you would have expected to see some meaningful sales. Sony on the other hand did only launch one single system camera in the past 13 months. Maybe they are slowing everything down because of the horror market?

Source CIPA.

Panasonic announced the G90…no wait G95…no sorry G99!

Panasonic has that weird ritual to name a camera in different ways for some mysterious dark marketing reasons. So, if you live in Asia this new camera is named G99, in Europe G90 and in the USA G95.

Anyhow, the new G Whatever has been announced along the new 14-140mm II lens. More info below:

Preorders:
G95 at Amazon, BHphoto, Adorama
14-140mm II lens at Amazon, BHphoto, Adorama

Reviews:
Preview at DPreview. Image samples at Dpreview. Hands-on at ePhotozine. Review at CameraJabber. First look at CameraLabs. First impression at Photographyblog.

Exciting scientific news: First ever picture of a Black Hole Horizon to be shown on April 10

The image on top shows you the Black Hole as seen in the movie Interstellar. But nobody yet has ever photographed a real Black Hole. While it would be impossible to see the black hole itself due to the fact that light simply cannot escape their gravitational pull and reach observers on Earth, scientists focused their efforts on procuring an image of its event horizon. And the Event Horizon Telescope is humanity first attempt to take a  close up picture of this phenomena.

They will publish this image on April 10. You can watch the livestream here: https://www.youtube.com/c/VideosatNSF/live

Canon interview at DPreview: “the pro-level camera that you’re expecting is on the way”

DPreview interviewed Canon managers and here are some highlights:

– RF mount: “we were expecting it to be more suitable for designing wider-angle lenses, but it turned out to be very effective for designing this telephoto lens (70-200mm f/2.8)”
– About the PRO camera: “the pro-level camera that you’re expecting is on the way”
– Canon will keep developing the M-series

I hope the PRO camera will have a new kind of sensor that can be really close to Sony sensors!

Fujifilm interview at Dpreview: Full-frame can probably reach 70-80MP and with GFX we go 100MP

Dpreview had a chat with Makoto Oishi from Fuji. A couple of takeaways:

Medium format:

  • GFX doubled the market size of the medium format segment. 20% of GFX buyers are professionals.
  • Full-frame can probably reach 70-80MP. GFX lenses were all originally designed for 100MP resolution.

APS-C:

  • We’re positioning APS-C against full-frame, and its faster, and more responsive because of the smaller sensor

Open mount:

  • We don’t feel that we need to open up the mount to third parties.

The next revolution is…

  • From a sensor point of view, everyone is talking about global shutter. That is one thing, which will come at some point in the future. The other thing is more computational and Artificial Intelligence technologies making it into cameras. Probably those two things.