Photo News

Image: Peak Design / Carryology

Well-known camera accessory brand Peak Design has teamed up with gear review publication Carryology to release special editions of several of its popular photography accessories. The brands' 'Essentials Collab' contains special editions of Peak Design's Capture Clip, Mobile Tripod and Cuff, as well as its Slide, Slide Lites and Leash straps.

The Capture Clip is the standout product in the collaboration. Normally it comes in black or silver, and is meant to give you an easy anchor point for your camera that can be mounted onto a backpack strap or belt. The Carryology version, however, includes a hexagonal print pattern on the back and is the same bright orange that features on several other Carryology Essentials products – though you'd be forgiven for initially mistaking it with the Cinnabar orange that Sony uses for its Alpha branding.

Buy Now:

Capture Clip: $85 at Peak Design

While the orange accents on the Carryology-branded straps and Cuff are decidedly more subtle, they actually have a functional difference compared to the standard Peak Design versions. According to the press release, they "incorporate Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene" threads to add durability and cut resistance.

The regular Slide strap is purely made of tubular nylon webbing, whereas the Carryology version also includes UHMWP. Image: Peak Design/Carryology

UHMWP—often sold under the brand name Dyneema—is a material well-known in the outdoor gear world, with its strength-to-weight ratio often being a big selling point. According to Peak Design, its inclusion in the straps could make it more difficult for someone to cut them in an attempt to steal your camera off your body. However, that does raise the question of whether you want an accessory that will frustrate criminals who are standing very close to you with a blade.

Putting that aside, using UHMWP should help make the strap more durable and could help give you a bit more confidence if you often use your camera around sharp objects such as rocks or industrial equipment. The orange hardware also definitely stands out compared to the black, grey, and silver levers that typically come on Peak Design's straps.

Buy Now:

Slide: $80 at Peak Design Leash: $55 at Peak Design Cuff: $40 at Peak Design

The final product in the lineup is the Mobile Tripod, which is designed to work with Peak Design's 'Everyday' phone cases or other MagSafe-compatible cases. Like the Capture Clip, it also has a hexagon-like print, though there's far less orange in the design.

The Mobile Tripod is a foldable stand that stores away on the back of your phone. Image: Peak Design / Carryology

Peak Design says the Carryology editions will sell for 10-15% more than the versions without the cobranding, and will be available today on Peak Design's site.

2024 inductees: International Photography Hall of Fame

Clockwise from top left: James Balog, Sam Abell, Martin Parr, Eve Arnold, Richard Misrach, Paul Caponigro. (Not pictured: Anne Wilkes Tucker)

The International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum (IPHF) has announced its 2024 class of inductees, a group that includes photographers, visionaries and historians who exemplify the artistry, passion and evolution of the photographic arts. The IPHF class of 2024 will be formally inducted on November 1st.

According to a statement by the museum, "The [2024] inductees, though widely differing in style and practice, are individually seen as significant innovators in their respective fields. They are all risk-takers who introduced the world to new means of artistic representation and expression."

The International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum, located near St. Louis, Missouri, is a non-profit organization dedicated to celebrating the achievements of the inventors, pioneers and pivotal artists throughout the history of photography. Its permanent collection includes works from more than 500 artists and more than 10,000 photographs.

Sam Abell

Same Abell (b. 1945) is one of America's most influential documentary photographers, celebrated for his in-depth color photo essays for National Geographic magazine, where he photographed more than 20 articles covering topics from culture to wilderness subjects.

Abell learned photography from his father, a high school geography teacher, while growing up in Sylvania, Ohio. From 1971-2001, he was a contract and staff photographer for National Geographic.
In 1990, his work was the subject of a one-person exhibition and monograph titled Stay This Moment at the International Center of Photography in New York City.
He has published four additional collections of his work: Seeing Gardens, Sam Abell: The Photographic Life, The Life of a Photograph and Sam Abell Library. 


Abell maintains a career as a writer, teacher and lecturer on photography.
He has served on the boards of the George Eastman House and the University of Virginia Museum of Art.
In 2024, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from The Photo Society.

Photo ©Sam Abell

Eve Arnold

Eve Arnold (1912-2012) was a pioneering American photojournalist celebrated for her candid and empathetic portraits of people from diverse walks of life. Born in Philadelphia in 1912, Arnold began her career in the 1950s and quickly gained recognition for her insightful documentary photography. Arnold was a member of the prestigious Magnum Photos agency, the first woman to be invited to join. Her work spanned a wide range of subjects, including political figures, celebrities, and marginalized communities. Arnold's most notable projects include her intimate portraits of Marilyn Monroe, her documentation of the Civil Rights movement, and her exploration of life in China and Afghanistan.

Arnold's photographs are characterized by their warmth, honesty, and compassion. Her legacy as a trailblazer in photojournalism continues to inspire generations of photographers worldwide. In 1980, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Magazine Photographers, and the National Book Award for In China. She was later made a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and named a Master Photographer by New York’s International Center of Photography.

She published twelve books in her lifetime. She passed away in January 2012 at the age of 99.

Photo ©Eve Arnold

Paul Caponigro

Paul Caponigro (b. 1932) is known for his captivating and mystical landscape images. His exquisite silver gelatin prints depict images of nature, including flowers, cloud formations, and forest settings, and his work forms a visual bridge between the material world of physical forms and the living spirit behind them. He studied at Boston University College of Music in 1950 before focusing on photography at the California School of Fine Art, where Ansel Adams had established one of the first photography programs in the United States.

Caponigro is best known for his interest in natural forms, landscapes, and still lifes. His subjects include Stonehenge and other Celtic megaliths of England and Ireland; the temples, shrines and sacred gardens of Japan; and the deep mystical woodland of New England.

His twelve books include Sunflower, Megaliths, and The Wise Silence. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships and three National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants. In recognition of a sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography, Caponigro was awarded The Royal Photographic Society’s Centenary Medal and Honorary Fellowship in 2001 and the Lucie Awards Outstanding Achievement In Fine Art Photography in 2021

Photo ©SPaul Caponigro

Richard Misrach

Richard Misrach (b. 1949) is one of the most influential photographers of his generation. In the 1970s, he helped pioneer the renaissance of color photography and large-scale presentation that are in widespread practice today.

For five decades, Richard Misrach has been one of the most significant and influential photographers of the American landscape. He is best known for his monumental epic, Desert Cantos, a multifaceted study of our political, cultural and environmental relationship to the natural world. Recent projects mark departures from his work to date. In one series, he has experimented with new advances in digital capture and printing, foregrounding the negative as an end in itself and digitally creating images with astonishing detail and color spectrum. In another, he built a powerful narrative out of images of graffiti produced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, made with a 4-megapixel pocket camera.

Misrach's museum exhibit, Border Cantos, a collaboration with experimental composer Guillermo Galindo, traveled to the San Jose Museum of Art; Amon Carter Museum of Art, Fort Worth; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Pace Gallery, New York; Samek Art Museum; and the Missoula Art Museum. The exhibition and the accompanying publication - Border Cantos (Aperture, 2016) - explored complex issues surrounding the US-Mexico border through Misrach’s photographs of landscapes and objects left behind by migrants, together with Galindo's haunting musical instruments, sound installations, and scores.

Photo ©Richard Misrach

Martin Parr

Martin Parr (b. 1952) is one of the best-known documentary photographers of his generation. With over 100 books of his own published and another 30 edited by Parr, his photographic legacy is already established. Parr also acts as a curator and editor. He has curated two photography festivals, Arles in 2004 and Brighton Biennial in 2010. More recently, Parr curated the Barbican exhibition Strange and Familiar.

Parr has been a member of the Magnum agency since 1994 and was President from 2013 - 2017. In 2013, Parr was appointed as the visiting professor of photography at the University of Ulster. Parr’s work has been collected by many of the leading museums, including the Tate, the Pompidou and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Martin Parr established the Martin Parr Foundation in 2017.

In 2019, the National Portrait Gallery in London held a major exhibition of Parr’s work titled Only Human.

Photo ©Martin Parr

James Balog

The International Photography Hall of Fame has announced that James Balog will receive its 2024 Visionary Award.

For nearly 40 years, photographer James Balog (b. 1952) has broken new conceptual and artistic ground on one of the most important issues of our era: human modification of nature. He has been a leader in photographing, understanding and interpreting the natural environment for three decades. An avid mountaineer with a graduate degree in geography and geomorphology, James is equally at home on a Himalayan peak or a whitewater river, the African savannah or polar icecaps.

To reveal the impact of climate change, James founded the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), the most wide-ranging, ground-based, photographic study of glaciers ever conducted. The project is also featured in the 2009 NOVA documentary “Extreme Ice” and the feature-length documentary “Chasing Ice,” premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2012.

James is the author of seven books, including "ICE: Portraits of the World’s Vanishing Glaciers." Among his other books are Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest and Survivors: A New Vision of Endangered Wildlife. His work has been extensively published in the world’s major pictorial magazines, including National Geographic, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Life, American Photo, Vanity Fair, Sierra, Audubon, and Outside. In 1996, James was the first photographer ever commissioned by the U.S. Postal Service to create a full sheet of stamps.

Photo ©James Balog

Anne Wilkes Tucker

Anne Wilkes Tucker (b. 1945) is the curator emerita of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, having, in 1976, become founding curator of the photography department for which she acquired 30,000 photographs made on all seven continents. She curated or co-curated over 40 exhibitions, most with accompanying catalogs, including surveys on the Czech Avant-garde, the history of Japanese photography, and the history of war photography.

She has also contributed articles to over 150 magazines, books and other catalogs and has lectured throughout North and South America, Europe and Asia. Her honors, fellowships, and awards include being selected as “America’s Best Curator” by Time magazine in 2001 in an issue devoted to America’s Best.

Photo ©Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Image: Apple

Apple has announced a new iMac, which comes equipped with its latest M4 processor and 16GB of memory standard – double what the previous generation started with. The computer, which is a popular pick for creatives and photographers who don't necessarily need the computer power or modularity of Apple's higher-end models, is available in seven colors: blue, purple, pink, orange, yellow, green and silver.

Like before, Apple's selling a base model that has two Thunderbolt ports, and a less powerful processor. The two-port model has an M4 chip with 4 performance CPU cores and 4 efficiency CPU cores, along with an 8 core GPU. The upgraded four-port models add two efficiency and GPU cores. They also max out at 2TB of storage instead of 1, and 32GB RAM instead of 24.

Apple opted to release a video presentation for the iMac, instead of just doing a press release – though it does spend the first four minutes rehashing its AI features.

Those four ports are all full Thunderbolt 4 now; the previous-gen four-port iMac had two Thunderbolt ports and two USB 3 ports, which were substantially slower.

The built-in 24" display appears to be unchanged from the previous model. It's still a 4.5K 'Retina' panel with a max brightness of 500 nits and support for P3 color. However, there's good news for fans of external displays: the four-port models with 10-core GPUs can drive up to two 6K/60Hz displays alongside the built-in screen or a single 8K display at 120Hz. The previous-generation iMac only supported one external display, though that's unfortunately also true for the new two-port iMac as well.

Four full-speed ports is good if you want to use a bunch of displays. Like with previous models, the four-port iMac also includes a gigabit ethernet port built into the power brick.

Image: Apple

Another downside for the two-port model is that you can't add the 'Nano-texture' display option like you can with the higher-end models. Apple says the $200 add-on, which wasn't available on the previous M3 iMac, will "reduce reflectivity and glare while maintaining outstanding image quality." Essentially, it's a matte display option for those whose computers are often in direct sunlight.

The new iMac also has some other small upgrades. The 1080p webcam now supports Apple's 'Center Stage' and 'Desk View' features that work to keep you in the frame and show off what's on the desk in front of the computer, respectively. The included color-matched peripherals now use the near-universal USB-C to charge instead of the old Lightning; the keyboard included with the four-port model includes a Touch ID sensor, which is missing on the keyboard that comes with the two-port model.

Overall, the new iMacs should continue the tradition of being decent all-in-ones for photo editing, light video work and general use, especially now that they're no longer blighted by a woefully inadequate 8GB of RAM – a change Apple will hopefully bring that change to the rest of its lineup too. The base storage, however, is still stuck at 256GB, and Apple still charges a pretty penny for its bigger SSDs.

It's also nice to see that Apple hasn't raised the base price of the iMac in the US: the base model still starts at $1,299. However, it's arguable that most people should spend the $200 upgrade to the four-port model, as you get a lot of bang for your buck. If you go with the base model, though, you'll be glad to hear that Apple's now selling it in all seven colors, while the previous base iMacs only came in a limited selection.

The new iMacs are available for pre-order now, and will start hitting store shelves on November 8th. Apple says it has two more Mac announcements coming this week.

The Aether x Leica Reporter Jacket was developed in collaboration with four of Leica's sponsored 'Ambassador' photographers.

Photo: Aether

US travel/adventure clothing brand Aether has collaborated with Leica and some of its sponsored photographers to develop a jacket with photographer-friendly details.

The Aether x Leica Reporter Jacket is waxed cotton field jacket with pockets designed specifically for camera batteries and SD card holders, with an additional SD card pocket in its collar. The army green jacket is designed to match the color of Leica's 'Reporter' special edition cameras.

There's also a rear pocket that Aether says is large enough for a tablet. The jacket has waterproof zips on its pockets but the company only considers the jacket to be "water-repellent". Which feels almost like a comment on the promises of 'weather resistance' by camera makers.

Like a rubber gasket on the back of a high-end lens, the waterproof zips indicate some consideration of weather sealing.

Photo: Aether

But, now photography no longer requires us to lash rolls of film to a khaki vest, do these design details really make the jacket that much more photo friendly? Do you regularly find yourself wishing you could stash a spare memory card in the neck of your jacket? And, if you're going to buy a jacket made in collaboration with Leica, shouldn't it at least have a red top button?

Aether will make just 125 examples of the jacket, which will cost $795 and be available from its website and stores.

Press Release:

AETHER APPAREL AND LEICA CAMERA UNITE TO LAUNCH LIMITED-EDITION JACKET FOR THE MODERN PHOTOGRAPHER

Designed by photographers for photographers, the durable and naturally water-repellent AETHER x Leica Reporter Jacket brings together a unique combination of functionality and design to support excellence in the field

LOS ANGELES, October 29, 2024 — AETHER, the Los Angeles-based outerwear brand creating high-end gear for all of life’s adventures, and Leica, the international camera company with a history of excellence in German craftsmanship and design, have partnered to create the AETHER x Leica Reporter Jacket. The special collaboration has produced a limited edition of 125 jackets designed to enhance a photographer’s creative journey. The Reporter Jacket was developed with input from top Leica photographers and is crafted to carry all the essentials needed for a day in the field.

“We’re committed to evolving the craft of photography and making it more accessible for photographers,” says Mike Giannattasio, President of Leica Camera North America. “By partnering with AETHER, we’ve created a product that helps photographers carry everything they need efficiently in the field. The AETHER x Leica Reporter Jacket combines craftsmanship and functionality to truly enhance the photographer's journey—which is what matters most to us.”

Inspired by Leica’s storied ‘Reporter’ series featuring special-edition cameras in army green, the AETHER x Leica Reporter Jacket comes in the same iconic green color. Thoughtful details and design that one would expect from the partnering brands include:

• Waxed cotton to create a natural water-repellent fabric along with seam-sealed construction
• Strategically placed vents for breathability
• Internal battery pocket engineered to fit four camera batteries
• Large soft-lined hand pockets designed to carry a camera or lens
• Hidden SD card pocket on the collar; plus internal chest pocket to fit an SD card case
• Extra-large back pocket designed to fit a tablet and/or extra gear
• Detachable microfiber cleaning cloth

The concept for the AETHER x Leica Reporter Jacket was born from ongoing conversations between leadership at AETHER and Leica.

“This jacket is the result of countless design discussions starting with Steffen Keil at Leica AG, AETHER’s purpose-driven approach to outerwear, field testing, and guidance from an incredible roster of photographers,” says AETHER co-founder Jonah Smith, who also provided input on the design from his own experience as a photographer. “We’re proud to have designed a jacket that perfectly balances the practical features that a photographer needs with the refined silhouette that they want. For me personally, this project is a dream come true, as I’ve been using Leica cameras for 25 years.”

The Reporter Jacket was designed under guidance and input from four Leica camera ambassadors: Mathieu Bitton, Ragnar Axelsson, Cira Crowell, and Misan Harriman. Each lent their experience and expertise to create a jacket celebrating a photographer’s artistry and dedication to their craft.

“Finally having the ultimate jacket to work anywhere in the world and under any condition, with pockets for anything I need to work with, is a game changer for me and any photo enthusiast,” says Bitton. “Working with AETHER has been a very rewarding experience as they truly understand apparel that is not just great looking but extremely useful and of the highest possible quality. The Reporter Jacket is a perfect companion to my camera collection and a tool I will use on all my travels.”

The AETHER x Leica Reporter Jacket retails for $795 USD and is available now in limited quantities at aetherapparel.com and at AETHER retail locations nationwide.

When you use DPReview links to buy products, the site may earn a commission.

Its lustrous exterior might call to you but Panasonic's S9 model isn't primarily designed for 'Photographers.'

Photo: Dale Baskin

It's remarkable how excited some people get at the slightest touch of leatherette. That seductive, retro flourish on Panasonic's S9 full-framer seems to have encouraged some people to project their personal desires onto the camera, in spite of what's actually on offer.

Let's be clear: the S9 is primarily a vlogging camera, designed for creative video as much, or perhaps more, than it's intended as a stills camera.

It's not a mistake that there's no viewfinder, any more than some neglect or oversight has seen Panasonic fail to include a hot shoe, a mechanical shutter or a second at-your-fingertips command dial. Those omissions aren't accidental: they're intentional decisions to stop it under-cutting sales of Panasonic's more photo-focused S5 II models.

But that colorful faux-leather wrapping and its compact size seems to prompt people who want a GM successor or something that reminds them of their first SLR to overlook this.

"It's not a mistake that there's no viewfinder... hot shoe, mechanical shutter or second at-your-fingertips command dial"

Step back, though, and check what Panasonic has said – "a stylish companion for content creators on-the-go" – look at what the camera offers and what it doesn't. It's not intended as an alternative to Sony's a7C II, which has a mechanical second curtain, twin command dials on its shoulders, to make it more photographer-friendly. Along with an EVF and a list price $700 higher.

Looking at Sony's lineup, the S9 has more in common conceptually with the ZV-E1 vlogging camera – though the Sony's special features aim to replace a camera operator, whereas the Panasonic's try to eliminate the color grading process. In many regards, the S9 has most in common with Sigma's fp, with which it shares its shutterless sensor and lens mount. If you weren't queuing up for that camera five years ago, what's changed with Panasonic?

Fujifilm's X-M5 is also aimed at vloggers and content creators, though its twin command dials and mechanical shutter mean it's stronger for stills. But if you find yourself thinking it should have a viewfinder and something other than a Film Simulation dial, then there might be other models better suited to you.

Photo: Mitchell Clark

As I say, I think it comes down to the leatherette. A lot of established photographers see the S9's style-driven exterior and reminisce about the cameras of their youth. But with its talk of "content creators" and "the creative smartphone user," it's clear that Panasonic isn't trying to speak to people who bought a brand new Nikon FM, it's trying to reach people who picked one up in a thrift store.

As the industry desperately tries to find a way to attract a younger audience who have grown up shooting stills and video with their phones, this sort of thing is only going to become more common.

We saw the same thing with Fujifilm's X-T50, to an extent: established photographers decrying the presence of the Film Simulation dial. "Why can't it have an drive mode dial or something I'd find more useful" was a common complaint. To which the answer is: "because if you're the kind of user that wants an ISO dial, you're probably the kind of user that Fujifilm wants to buy the X-T5."

"When you see a feature and think 'that's no use to me,' it's worth asking yourself whether you should take that as a hint."

When you see a feature and think "that's no use to me," it's worth asking yourself whether you should take that as a hint. In order to reach a broader (and younger) market, we're going to see more and more models that aren't aimed at people that already consider themselves photographers.

Sony makes things a little clearer: omitting enough features from its vlogging camera that it doesn't work as a substitute for the a6700 but also using the ZV name, rather than 'Alpha' branding.

Photo: Richard Butler

There'll still be plenty of models for those that do, but camera lineups increasingly aren't going to be a progressive hierarchy of models differentiated by price; they're going to be a chaotic array of different models for different needs, trying to appeal to different audiences.

And that shouldn't be seen as a threat: if camera makers can engage with "creators" and "vloggers" and audiences that don't currently buy cameras, it'll help fund the development of the next generation of camera, including the more photo-focused ones, and it'll encourage the continued expansion of lens options.

But in the same way that the X-T50 isn't trying to be a cut-price X-T5, and the X-M5 isn't designed for those people still holding out for an X-E5, the Panasonic S9 isn't designed to be a compact full-framer for the committed stills shooter. Regardless of its apparent allure.

Early morning flog clings to the autumn landscape in the UK.

Photo: Richard Butler

Editor's Note: In recent months, we’ve introduced a series of Editors' Photo Challenges to spotlight the exceptional photography of DPReview readers. Based on your feedback, we’re making some changes to these challenges to create a more predictable schedule and to allow for broader participation:

Monthly Challenges: Going forward, we’ll host one challenge each month. Themes will be announced at the beginning of each month, with winners revealed by month’s end.

Photo Eligibility: To allow for more participation, future challenges will be open to photos taken at any time, regardless of when they were captured.

Thanks for sharing your work with us – it’s an honor to feature your talent and creativity on the site.

The theme for our November Editors' photo challenge is 'Fog'.

Fog provides endless creative possibilities for photography, from soft, diffused landscapes to ghostly cityscapes. It can add an ethereal quality to a scene that transforms the familiar into something magical. Show us the magic and mystery of mist with your favorite fog photos.

For this challenge, shoot and submit one or more photos that embody this month's theme. Each person can enter up to three photos.

How it works

DPReview editors will review every photo you upload to an Editors' Challenge. We'll publish our favorites in a gallery on the DPReview homepage at the end of the month.

How to submit your photos

Submissions will open on November 3, and you have until Saturday, November 9 (GMT), to submit entries. User voting will begin after that and will help inform DPReview Editors' picks, but will not select them. They are one factor in our evaluation of submissions.

Enter your photos here

Details

You must follow the rules below to be eligible to be featured in our gallery of winners.

Processing:

• Post-processing is allowed, but this is a photo contest, not a post-processing contest. Please, no composite, altered or fabricated images..

Additional rules:

• Photos must be at least 2400 pixels long on one edge.
• Include a title for your photo.
• Include a caption that tells us the story behind the photo, including when and where it was taken.
• Share what gear was used and your camera settings. If you used an interchangeable lens camera, please tell us what lens was used.
• Tell us about any edits you made in post-processing beyond basic things like white balance, exposure adjustments, etc.
• Our standard copyright and privacy terms and conditions policy applies.

Photo: Richard Butler

We're coming up on the end of the year, but are hard at work on getting a few more reviews done by 2025. In case you missed a thing or two here and there, here's a recap of the reviews and testing we've done this year so far!

October Sony ZV-E10 II: Review

Sony's ZV-E10 II is a stripped-down version of its APS-C flagship, the a6700, with a focus on vlogging. As such, our review mainly takes the form of a video, which you can watch above.

Read the review

Buy now:

$998 at Amazon.com$1098 w/ 16-50 at Adorama$1098 w/ 16-50 at B&H Photo Nikon Z6III: Review Photo: Richard Butler

Throughout our tests, the Nikon Z6III proved to be an incredibly capable camera at its price point. Its 24MP 'partially-stacked' sensor provided plenty of detail while also reading data out at a much higher speed, allowing for fast burst rates and video shooting with little risk of rolling shutter. We also appreciated its honed ergonomics and bright, high-resolution viewfinder.

Be sure to check out our Z6III sample gallery as well.

Read the review

Buy now:

$2296 at Amazon.com$2497 at Adorama$2497 at B&H Photo Panasonic 18-40mm F4.5-6.3: Sample gallery Photo: Mitchell Clark

Panasonic's 18-40mm F4.5-6.3 collapsable lens is meant to be an ultra-lightweight and compact companion to the company's S9 camera and is now being sold as a kit with the creator-focused offering.

See the sample gallery

Buy now:

$499 at Amazon.com$499 at Adorama$497 at B&H Photo Fujifilm X-M5: Initial review Photo: Mitchell Clark

The X-M5 is an entry-level offering from Fujifilm focused on vlogging and content creation. It's based around the company's 26MP X-Trans sensor and comes equipped with a film simulation dial, AI-trained subject detection autofocus and – unlike many other vlogging-focused options – a mechanical shutter.

You can also view the sample gallery we shot with the X-M5.

Read the initial review

Buy now:

$899 w/ 15-45 at Amazon.com$799 at Adorama$799 at B&H Photo Fujifilm XF16-55mm F2.8 II: Sample gallery Photo: Richard Butler

Another product Fujifilm launched in October was a second-generation of the company's 16-55mm F2.8 lens. It's essentially an APS-C version of the venerable 24-70, but unlike the first generation, the XF16-55mm F2.8 II is actually around 1/3 lighter than many of its full-frame counterparts. Its smaller size and weight convinced editor Richard Butler to take a preproduction copy with him on vacation to the UK, which gave him the opportunity to capture an incredible sample gallery.

See the sample gallery

Buy now:

$1199 at Adorama$1199 at B&H Photo Lowepro Photo Sport 300 photo pack: Review Photo: Dale Baskin

DPReview editor Dale Baskin has had the Lowepro Photo Sport 300 AW II for over 10 years and has put thousands of miles on the pack during his adventures across the planet. Given that it's still going strong and that you can still pick one up today, we decided it was time for a review.

Read the review

September Google Pixel Pro 9 Fold: Sample gallery Photo: Mitchell Clark

Google's flagship folding phone uses a different camera setup than the regular Pixel 9 Pro, so we shot a separate gallery to get a feel for what kind of performance you can expect from a phone that costs $1,800. Our sample guide article also discusses the experience of shooting with a phone that has a foldable 8" screen.

See the sample gallery

Sigma 28-105mm F2.8 DG DN Art: Sample gallery Photo: Mitchell Clark

Sigma's 28-105mm F2.8 DG DN Art is a lens for L-mount and Sony E-mount that's surprisingly compact given its focal range and maximum aperture. We got the chance to shoot with it on a holiday weekend at Glacier National Park.

See the sample gallery

Buy now:

Buy at Amazon.com$1499 at Adorama$1499 at B&H Photo Hasselblad XCD 20-35mm F3.2-4.5 E: Sample gallery Photo: Dale Baskin

Another lens released in September was the Hasselblad XCD 20-35mm F3.2-4.5 E, an ultra-wide zoom lens for the company's medium-format cameras. Our sample gallery was shot in Washington, DC and Oregon, giving us an idea of how the lens performs when shooting architecture and landscapes.

See the sample gallery

Canon EOS R5 II: Review Photo: Richard Butler

Canon's EOS R5 II is the company's latest high-end, full-frame mirrorless camera with a Stacked CMOS sensor and many of the autofocus features of the company's new flagship R1 model. It's so feature-rich that, in some ways, it was a struggle to review it; it's a tool for so many different types of photographers that it was nearly impossible for us to put ourselves in all those shoes. However, it's still clear that the EOS R5 II is an extremely capable camera for most use cases.

Read the review

Buy now:

$4299 at Amazon.com$4299 at Adorama$4299 at B&H Photo Leica Q3 43: Review Photo: Richard Butler

The Leica Q3 43 is essentially what it says on the tin: a Q3 with the 28mm fixed lens replaced by a 43mm one, giving the camera a 'normal' focal length that some photographers will find more pleasing. The built-in lens is almost shockingly sharp, and the package as a whole is an impressive and premium photographic tool – as you would hope, given the $6895 price tag.

You can also view our Q3 43 sample gallery.

Read the review

Buy now:

Buy at AdoramaBuy at B&H PhotoBuy at Leica August Sigma 24-70mm F2.8 II: Sample gallery Photo: Dale Baskin

Sigma announced the second generation of its 24-70mm F2.8 DG DN Art lens in May, and we were able to shoot with it on our trip to Japan. However, we wound up publishing our sample gallery in August, as we wanted to ensure that the sample we'd used was representative.

See the sample gallery

Buy now:

$1199 at Adorama$1199 at B&H Photo Google Pixel 9 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro XL: Sample gallery Photo: Dale Baskin

We shot a sample gallery with Google's latest flagship smartphones, making sure to test out each of the three cameras, as well as the night mode. Spoiler alert: the gallery isn't the last time Glacier National Park will feature in one of our tests.

See the sample gallery

Fujifilm X-T50: Review Photo: Richard Butler

The Fujifilm X-T50 is a classically-styled mid-level APS-C mirrorless camera that uses Fujifilm's stabilized 40MP X-Trans sensor. We found that it's an excellent choice for those looking to learn the art of photography, or who want to upgrade from a smartphone – as long as they have some cash to spare.

You can also browse the sample gallery we shot with a production model.

Read the review

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$1399 at Amazon.com$1399 at Adorama$1399 at B&H Photo Sony FE 85mm F1.4 GM II: Sample gallery Photo: Dale Baskin

This summer, Sony released the second generation of its FE 85mm F1.4 GM lens, which weighs around 20% less than the first-generation model. We shot a sample gallery with it and were generally impressed with how sharp the results were.

See the sample gallery

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$1798 at Adorama$1798 at B&H Photo July Leica D-Lux 8: Initial review Photo: Richard Butler

The Leica D-Lux 8 is an updated 17MP enthusiast zoom compact camera, with a switch dedicated to taking different crops of its Four Thirds-sized sensor. It definitely comes at a premium price, but it's also one of the last enthusiast compacts left on the market.

While writing our initial review, we also shot a sample gallery with it.

Read the initial review

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$1595 at Adorama$1595 at B&H Photo Sigma 18-50mm F2.8 DC DN for Canon RF: Sample gallery Photo: Mitchell Clark

The Sigma 18-50mm F2.8 DC DN itself isn't new this year, but the version for Canon's RF mount is. It fills a gap in the lineup of fast standard zooms that made sense for Canon APS-C cameras, making them a little easier to recommend.

See the sample gallery

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$519 at Amazon.com$599 RF at Adorama$599 RF at B&H Photo Canon EOS R1: Initial review Photo: Dale Baskin

In July, Canon announced the EOS R1, a new high-end sports and photojournalism camera and the company's first mirrorless camera to bear the 1-series label. It features a 24MP stacked full-frame sensor and can shoot up to 40fps in E-shutter mode.

While attending Canon's North American launch event for the EOS R1, we took a sample gallery using a preproduction model.

Read the initial review

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Buy at AdoramaBuy at B&H Photo Canon EOS R5 II: Pre-production sample gallery Photo: Dale Baskin

Alongside the EOS R1, Canon also announced the EOS R5 II, an update to its high-end, high-resolution hybrid camera. Like the EOS R1, it features sports-focused Action Priority autofocus modes, which is why the sample gallery we shot with a pre-production model features plenty of basketball pictures.

See the sample gallery

June Sigma 28-45mm F1.8 DG DN: Sample gallery Photo: Richard Butler

The Sigma 28-45mm F1.8 DG DN is a wide-to-medium zoom lens for E-mount and L-mount cameras.

We were able to test it out throughout the UK, from downtown London to the serene countryside.

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$1349 at Adorama$1349 at B&H Photo Panasonic Lumix DC-GH7: Initial review Photo: Dale Baskin

Panasonic's GH-line of Micro Four Thirds cameras has historically been focused on video shooters. While the GH7 is no exception, it also has a surprisingly complete suite of photography features.

In addition to our initial review, we also released an initial impressions video.

Read the initial review

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$2197 at Amazon.com$2198 at Adorama$2198 at B&H Photo Nikon Z6III: First-look video and sample gallery Photo: Richard Butler

In June Nikon announced the Z6III, a full-frame camera designed for hybrid shooters and featuring a 25MP 'partially-stacked' sensor. It can shoot Raw video internally, and has a higher-resolution sensor than its predecessor.

We shot a video breaking down what's new with the camera and a sample gallery with a preproduction model on a fairly typical spring day in Seattle.

See the sample gallery

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$2296 at Amazon.com$2497 at Adorama$2497 at B&H Photo Pentax 17: Review Photo: Dale Baskin

The Pentax 17 is perhaps an unusual product for DPReview to cover, given that it's a film camera. However, it was hard to pass up the opportunity to review the first new film camera we've seen from a major manufacturer in decades.

The Pentax 17 takes half-frame photos, letting you squeeze double the shots out of any given roll of film – a sign of the times in an age where film prices have only been going up.

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$499 at Amazon.com$499 at Adorama$499 at B&H Photo May Fujifilm X100VI: Review Photo: Richard Butler

The Fujifilm X100VI is a photographers' fixed-lens camera that combines a stabilized 40MP APS-C sensor with a 35mm equivalent F2 lens.

We had plenty of good things to say about it when we published our in-depth review in May, but even months later, it's still not easy to buy one. Still, give the full review a read so you know whether you want to jump on the opportunity to get it if one ever shows up – or to just live vicariously through us.

Read the full review

Google Pixel 8a: Sample gallery Image: Mitchell Clark

Japan is one of our favorite places to shoot sample galleries, especially when it's raining. We got the opportunity to do one for Google's budget phone while visiting the country to cover the launch of the Panasonic S9.

See the sample gallery

Sigma 15mm F1.4 Diagonal Fisheye: Sample Gallery Photo: Jose Francisco Salgado

After Sigma's announcement of the astrophotography-focused 15mm F1.4 DG DN Art, we teamed up with photographer José Francisco Salgado to put it through its paces in the Canadian sub-arctic.

See the sample gallery

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$1975 at Amazon.comBuy at Adorama$1999 at B&H Photo Fujifilm XF16-50mm F2.8-4.8 R LM WR: Sample gallery Photo: Jeff Carlson

The Fujinon XF16-50mm F2.8-4.8 R LM WR is Fujifilm's second-generation premium kit zoom, and we were able to take preproduction samples in Stockholm, Sweden.

See the sample gallery

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$699 at Amazon.com$699 at Adorama$699 at B&H Photo Sony a9 III: Review Photo: Richard Butler

The Sony a9 III is the company's latest high-end sports/action photography camera, with a 24MP global shutter.

In our in-depth review, we found some image quality trade-offs, but in return, you get the ability to shoot at 120fps without fear of banding.

Read the review

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$5998 at Amazon.com$5998 at Adorama$5998 at B&H Photo Panasonic S9: Initial review Photo: Dale Baskin

The Panasonic S9 is a full-frame camera designed specifically with content creators in mind. It has a dedicated button to select a LUT (look up table) to quickly change the look of footage or pictures in-camera.

Alongside our initial review, we published a sample gallery largely shot in Osaka, Japan, which now includes Raws and images with LUTs applied.

Read the initial review

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$1799 w/ 18-40mm at Amazon.com$1498 at Adorama$1798 w/ 20-60mm at B&H Photo Fujifilm X-T50: First look video and preview samples Photo: Richard Butler

In May, Fujifilm announced the X-T50, an APS-C camera aimed at beginners, featuring a dial dedicated to controlling the company's 'film simulation' color profiles. At launch, we published our initial review, first look video and a sample gallery taken with preproduction hardware.

See the sample gallery

April Panasonic S5II: Review Photo: Richard Butler

The Panasonic S5II had the unfortunate luck of landing in our office right about the time we found out that our parent company planned to close DPReview in 2023, so it never went through our regular review process. We've been looking for an opportunity to review it ever since we joined forces with Gear Patrol last summer and finally found the time.

The timing turned out to be good: Panasonic was able to provide us with an early version of the camera's new firmware (v3.0), so we were able to test it with the latest features. Read our review to find out why we think this camera is such a great all-around performer for enthusiasts and pros alike.

Read the review

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$1697 at Amazon.com$1798 at Adorama$1798 at B&H Photo Sony FE 16-25mm F2.8 G: Sample gallery Photo: Shaminder Dulai

The Sony FE 16-25mm F2.8 G is a relatively compact wide-angle zoom lens aimed at street and travel photographers.

We were able to get our hands on the lens for a day and figured most readers would be curious to see some examples of street and architectural photography, so we hit the streets of downtown Seattle and ducked into the Seattle Public library when the weather turned ugly.

See the sample gallery

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$1198 at Amazon.com$1198 at Adorama$1198 at B&H Photo Viltrox AF 40mm F2.5 Z: Sample gallery Image: Dale Baskin

The Viltrox AF 40mm F2.5 Z is a full-frame lens for Nikon Z-mount cameras.

We were able to test it out in Seattle and Oregon, testing the normal lens in a variety of lighting situations.

See the sample gallery

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$142 at Amazon.com$158 at B&H Photo March Sony FE 24-50mm F2.8 G: Sample gallery Photo: Eric Limer

Sony's FE 24-50mm F2.8 G is a fast, compact walk-around lens for its full-frame E-mount cameras. We took it out in snow and sun in New Jersey to put it through its paces.

In practice, we found that it makes for a light and portable package with convenient and satisfying hands-on controls and quick and quiet focus.

See the sample gallery

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$1,098 at Amazon $1,098 at B&H Photo $1,098 at Adorama Leica SL3: Initial review Photo: Richard Butler

The Leica SL3 is a 60MP DSLR-shaped mirrorless camera built around Leica's L-mount. It brings a lot of technology from the Leica M11 models but also features a radically redesigned interface. In March we published our initial review.

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$6995 at Adorama$6995 at B&H Photo Panasonic Lumix S 28-200mm F4-7.1 Macro OIS: Sample gallery Photo: Dale Baskin

Panasonic's newest zoom lens, the Lumix S 28-200mm F4-7.1 Macro OIS, is so small that it just begs to be used for travel, so we took it on a trip to Japan to see if it lives up to its promise. It proved to be an outstanding choice, allowing us to cover a wide range of focal lengths without ever feeling like we were dragging around too much gear. We were pretty pleased with the optical performance, too.

See the sample gallery

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$853 at Amazon.com$898 at Adorama$898 at B&H Photo

Panasonic Lumix DC-G9 II: Studio scene Photo: Brendan Nystedt

As we enter the final phase of our Panasonic Lumix DC-G9 II review, we've added the test scene images to our image comparison tool.

See the studio scene

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$1697 at Amazon.com$1898 at Adorama$1898 at B&H Photo Sony a9 III: Sample gallery updated Photo: Carey Rose

We updated our Sony a9 III sample gallery to include more sports and to get a feel for how effective its global shutter sensor is when combined with subject-detection autofocus in a variety of scenarios. And just to be safe, we also included some low ISO landscape images for those who want to evaluate image quality for other types of photography.

See the sample gallery

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$5998 at Amazon.com$5998 at Adorama$5998 at B&H Photo The Panasonic S5IIX goes to Japan: Sample gallery Photo: Dale Baskin

We were working on our review of the Panasonic S5II when it came time for our annual trek to Yokohama, Japan, for the camera industry's annual CP+ trade show, so we took along the S5IIX for some additional testing. It was a joy to shoot and it did a great job of capturing the color and texture of Japan, from the streets of Tokyo to snow monkeys near Nagano. It also proved that its weather sealing was up to the task, operating for hours in pouring rain without missing a beat.

See the sample gallery

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$1997 at Amazon.com$1997 at Adorama$1997 at B&H Photo Panasonic Lumix G9 II: Review Photo: Brendan Nystedt

The Panasonic G9 II is the first Panasonic Micro Four Thirds camera to include phase detect autofocus and is based on the same body as the full-frame S5 II. It also comes with a surprisingly long list of video features. Read our full review to find out what we liked and what we didn't.

Read the review

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$1697 at Amazon.com$1898 at Adorama$1898 at B&H Photo Sigma 50mm F1.2 DG DN Art: Sample gallery Photo: Jeff Carlson

The Sigma 50mm F1.2 DG DN Art is a comparatively lightweight prime lens aimed at travel, portrait and street photographers. Contributing editor Jeff Carlson immediately jumped on the opportunity to shoot a sample gallery with this lens, capturing spring cherry blossoms, portraits and some low-light photos for good measure.

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$1399 at Adorama$1399 at B&H Photo Nikon 28-400m F4-8: Pre-production sample gallery Photo: Dale Baskin

We had an opportunity to try a pre-production version of Nikon's new 28-400mm F4-8 superzoom lens shortly before it was announced. Let's just say this lens really intrigues us, and we can't wait to get our hands on a production copy for more testing.

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$1299 at Amazon.com$1297 at Adorama$1297 at B&H Photo February Hasselblad 907X / CFV 100C: Sample gallery

Image: Hasselblad

Hasselblad's CFV 100C medium format digital back brings most of the features of the X2D 100C to smaller form factor that's compatible with a wide range of cameras from the company's history. We paired it with a 907X camera / lens adaptor and XCD 28mm F4.0 and XCD 90mm F2.5 lenses to shoot a sample gallery.

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$8,199 at B&H Photo $8,199 at Adorama Megadap ETZ21 Pro Sony-to-Nikon mirrorless lens adapter: Review Photo: Dan Bracaglia

After getting our hands on it, we can say that, as far as what’s currently available for Sony shooters wishing to dabble in the Nikon realm, there is no better option on the market than the Megadap ETZ21 Sony E-mount to Nikon Z-mount lens adapter.

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$249 at Amazon $249 at B&H Photo $249 at Adorama Nikon Zf: Video reel update Photo: Richard Butler

Nikon's Zf is a full-frame mirrorless camera with classic styling, built around a 24MP BSI CMOS sensor. It's designed to mimic the look of the company's FM2 SLR from the early 1980s, meaning it effectively becomes a full-frame counterpart to the company's Z fc APS-C camera. In February, we updated our review with a video reel and impressions.

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$1997 at Amazon $1997 at B&H Photo $1997 kit at Adorama Panasonic Lumix DC-S5 II: Studio scene Photo: Richard Butler

As we complete our Panasonic Lumix DC-S5 II review, we've run the camera through our recently revitalized studio test scene to see how it performs against the competition.

See the results

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$1798 at B&H Photo $1798 at Adorama $1798 at Amazon Fujifilm X100VI: Initial review Photo: Richard Butler

February finally brought us the X100VI, a photographers' fixed-lens camera that combines a stabilized 40MP APS-C sensor with a 35mm equivalent F2 lens. We had it day one, and have published our initial review along with a sample gallery. Unfortunately, those won't help you actually find one to buy.

Read the review

See the sample gallery

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$1,599 at B&H Photo $1,599 at Adorama $1,599 at Amazon OM System OM-1 II: Sample gallery Photo: Shaminder Dulai

The OM System OM-1 Mark II is a high-speed Micro Four Thirds camera based around a 20MP Stacked CMOS sensor. As the name implies, it's an updated version of the flagship OM-1, with a series of hardware and firmware improvements. In February we published a sample gallery to update our initial review.

See the sample gallery

Read the initial review

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$2399 at Amazon $2399 at B&H Photo $2399 kit at Adorama January Sony a9 III: Initial review Photo: Richard Butler

The Sony a9 III is the company's latest high-speed pro sports camera. It features a Stacked CMOS sensor capable of shooting at 120 fps and able to read all its pixels out simultaneously: the long hoped-for 'global' shutter. Our studio scene analysis shows that it comes at a cost.

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$5998 at Amazon $5998 at B&H $5998 at Adorama Lumix S 100mm F2.8 Macro: Sample gallery Photo: Shaminder Dulai

Panasonic's Lumix S 100mm F2.8 Macro is a full-frame L-mount lens that's designed to be compact and lightweight, coming in at 82mm (3.2") long and 74mm (2.9") in diameter and tipping the scales at 298g (10.5 oz). Hands-on, we can confirm it is very tidy and light.

See the sample gallery

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$998 at B&H Photo $998 at Adorama Sony FE 16-35mm F2.8 GM II: Sample gallery

Photo: Dan Bracaglia

Sony's 16-35mm F2.8 GM II lens is smaller, lighter and more capable than its predecessor. Optical improvements come in the form of better corner-to-corner sharpness and a new close-focus distance of just 22 cm.

See the sample gallery

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$2,298 at B&H Photo $2,298 at Adorama iPhone 15 Pro Max: Sample gallery Photo: Jeff L Carlson

When we published our iPhone 15 Pro Sample Gallery, we didn’t yet have an iPhone 15 Pro Max model in hand. In addition to boasting a larger 6.7-inch screen, the Max differentiates itself by having a 5x (120mm equivalent) telephoto camera with a clever tetraprism design. The iPhone 15 Pro’s telephoto camera, meanwhile, shares the same 3x (77mm equivalent) field of view as the iPhone 14 Pro. Is the extra reach worth the bigger physical size and higher cost?

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iPhone 15 Pro Max: $1199 at Apple Canon EOS R100: Review Photo: Shaminder Dulai

The Canon EOS R100 is an ultra-compact 24 Megapixel APS-C mirrorless camera with an RF mount. It is the cheapest way to enter Canon's mirrorless ecosystem, offering more flexibility than a smartphone.

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$429 body only at Amazon $499 kit at B&H Photo $499 kit at Adorama Fujifilm XF23mm F2 R WR: Review Photo: Mike Tomkins

The Fujifilm XF 23mm F2 R WR is a very compact, portable, wide-angle prime lens for Fujifilm X-mount cameras. It makes a great walkaround lens and is well-suited for uses like travel and street photography, as well as things such as moderately wide landscapes and environmental portraiture.

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$449 at Amazon $449 at B&H $449 at Adorama Sony ZV-1 Mark II: Review Photo: Shaminder Dulai

The Sony ZV-1 Mark II is a vlogging-focused compact camera built around a 20MP Type 1 (13.2 x 8.8mm) Stacked CMOS sensor and an 18-50mm equivalent F1.8-4.0 lens. Besides the new focal length range, much of this camera remains the same as its predecessor, which was itself a competent pocket-sized video camera.

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$898 at Amazon $898 at B&H $898 at Adorama Tenba Axis V2 18L backpack: Review Photo: Tim Barribeau

The Tenba Axis V2 18L ($200) is a well-made, quietly competent but otherwise uninteresting backpack. Tenba has been in this industry long enough to know the basics of building a functional bag, but this simple black rectangle struggles to stand out against a field packed with more interesting, stylish, or specialized options like Peak Design's exceedingly versatile Everyday Bag or LowePro's hiking bag that happens to hold cameras well too.

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$200 at Tenba $200 at B&H Photo $200 at Amazon

When you use DPReview links to buy products, the site may earn a commission. Image: Sirui

Sirui, a company best known for its relatively inexpensive tripods and cinema lenses, has announced a lens that may appeal to photographers and videographers looking for an inexpensive portrait lens: a full-frame 85mm F1.4 with autofocus for Nikon Z-mount, Sony E-mount, and Fujifilm X-mount. On the latter it'll provide a roughly 128mm full-frame equiv. focal length.

The company says the lens is part of its Aurora series, though it's currently the only one bearing that nameplate; that does seem to suggest that we can expect more like it in the future.

The lens features an AF/MF switch, an autofocus lock button, and a switch to control whether the aperture ring is clicked or clickless. The company also claims it has "dustproof and waterproof construction" and a fluorine coating on the front element to help repel oils and water.

Image: Sirui

The lens has 14 elements in 9 groups: 1 aspherical lens, 2 ED elements, and 3 HRI elements. It has a 15-blade aperture and a minimum focusing distance of 0.85m (2 ft., 9.5"). The E-mount version weighs 540g (1.2lb), while the X and Z-mount versions are 10 and 30g heavier, respectively.

The Aurora 85mm F1.4 has a 67mm thread and a USB-C port on the lens mount for updating its firmware.

While fast 85mm lenses with autofocus aren't exactly rare – there's even already another third-party 85 F1.4 for the notoriously locked-down Nikon Z mount from Meike – it's nice to see another option hit the market, especially one with so many features. It'll be interesting to see what the image quality is like, especially given the relatively affordable price point Sirui is selling it at; the lens will normally retail for $599, but the company is doing an 'early bird' pricing promotion until December 31st which knocks it down to $499 if you buy it directly from them.

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$599 at Amazon.com Sirui Aurora 85mm F1.4 Specifications Principal specificationsLens typePrime lensMax Format size35mm FFFocal length85 mmImage stabilizationNoLens mountFujifilm X, Nikon Z, Sony EApertureMaximum apertureF1.4–16Minimum apertureF1.4–16Aperture ringYesNumber of diaphragm blades15OpticsElements14Groups9Special elements / coatings1 aspherical, 2 ED, 3 HRIFocusMinimum focus0.85 m (33.46″)Maximum magnification0.1152×AutofocusYesMotor typeStepper motorDistance scaleNoDoF scaleNoPhysicalWeight540 g (1.19 lb)Diameter80 mm (3.15″)Length102 mm (4.02″)SealingYesColourBlackFilter thread67 mmHood suppliedYesTripod collarNo

Logos: Adobe

This year, at Adobe's Max conference, the company announced several new AI features coming to Photoshop, Lightroom, and Adobe Camera Raw. We talked to some of the managers and engineers behind these products to get an idea of how those features came about and to try to get a sense of what the future holds for Adobe's photo editing suite.

Lightroom The Quick Actions UI gives you easy access to a variety of subject-specific edits.

One of the major new features for Lightroom Web and Mobile is called Quick Actions. It's a panel that lets you easily adjust various parts of your image, giving you different sliders and suggestions based on what type of subject it detects.

"It really started with a multi-year investment into masking," said Rob Christensen, director of product management for Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. "We had to make sure that masking was amazing. And so for multiple years, our R&D teams and our design teams came up with an experience that was outstanding. So once we had masking in place, and you could identify a subject, hair, lips, teeth, all of that, we realized, well, let's pair that up now with edits, and we'll call them Adaptive Presets."

Quick Actions essentially serve to make that work more visible and accessible. "With Quick Actions, what you're selecting in many cases are just Adaptive Presets that are relevant to that specific photo," Christensen said. "We're building from masking, Adaptive Presets, now Quick Actions. And it's all coming together now into a unified experience – that was our vision years ago, and now it's coming to life."

Christensen said that Adobe actually quietly launched the feature on the web a few months ago. "We didn't make a lot of noise around it, but customers have been using it on the web. Part of the reason why we brought it to Web first is it's just easier. We could get some additional feedback, we could do more experimentation; the web is very easy to iterate on."

"Part of the reason we also brought it to mobile is it's really designed for the mobile user, where they want to get to a quick result," Christensen said. "They don't necessarily want to go through all the different panels. In a mobile UI, a lot of things are hidden – but what if we could surface all of these advanced capabilities for mobile users to get to an edit? A bit of a goal over the last six months that's connected with Quick Actions is how do we help users capture, import, and share an amazing photo in under 60 seconds?"

At the moment, it's unclear if the feature will be coming to the dedicated desktop apps. "We're definitely looking at and listening to customer feedback. And so far, I think there's a lot of excitement, especially from desktop users. But we're not making any official announcements at this time."

The selection tool for Generative Remove has also been improved.

Image: Adobe

Generative Remove, which lets you use AI to erase objects from a scene using AI, is also now generally available across all versions of Lightroom. It's the type of thing you could easily do if you opened an image in Photoshop, but now you don't have to leave Lightroom.

"The way we think about what we're building with Lightroom is it's purpose-built for photographers," said Christensen. "So if they have a specific use case that is important for photography, we will look at bringing that into Lightroom. Distraction removal is a great example of an area that makes sense for photography. That's how a lot of customers are using generative remove today."

Finally, for Lightroom Classic devotees worried about any plans to completely replace the older-school version of the app with the new cloud-based Lightroom, Christensen seemed to offer some reassurance. "As it stands right now, we're continuing to innovate on both surfaces. We have a lot of customers on both that love the unique benefits."

Adobe Camera Raw

Left: Adobe Color. Right: Adobe Adaptive

Image: Adobe

One of the most compelling photography-related features announced at Max is the new Adobe Adaptive profile for ACR. It's meant to give you a better starting point for your own edits than older profiles like Adobe Color.

"One of the things that makes Adobe Adaptive unique is the fact that it's a lot more image content aware," said Eric Chan, a Senior Principal Scientist on the Adobe Camera Raw team. "In the past we would look at basic properties in the histogram and other attributes of the image. But with AI models now, we have a lot more semantic information about whether there's a person in it, whether there's a sky in it, etc."

That awareness helps it make base-level adjustments, giving you a better starting point to put your own edits on top. "It can do things like fix skies, fix backlit portraits, it can do things nicely with faces, and it can control a lot more attributes of the image than our previous profiles," Chan said.

You can control how intense the Adobe Adaptive look using the 'Amount' slider.

Unlike pressing the 'Auto' button on other profiles, Adobe Adaptive doesn't change the sliders for parameters like exposure, contrast, highlights, etc.; those are still set to 0, allowing you room to do your own edits. " I think the other unique aspect that there's an amount slider that's underneath the profile itself," said Chan. "You can do a quick edit. Like, I like what it's doing, but maybe it's too much, let's go to 80%, or maybe you want to go beyond, like 150%. But then there's the finer-granularity control, things like color panels that you can combine with that."

The company's also bringing its Generative AI features to ACR, including Generative Remove and Generative Expand, which lets you "go beyond the boundaries of your photo using the power of AI." In other words, you ask it to make your picture wider or taller, and it will try to fill in the space in a reasonable way. Any changes you make in ACR will also apply to the AI-generated portion of your picture, and the program will add a Content Credentials tag to the image, marking it as containing AI-generated content.

Generative Expand essentially lets you 'crop out' with AI imagery.

Those are interesting features to see in Adobe Camera Raw since, as the name implies, the program has previously been dedicated to adjusting the data your camera captured. Editing content using AI or other tools has been the domain of Photoshop and, to a lesser extent, Lightroom, which has had the Generative Remove feature for a while.

We asked what the thinking was behind adding Generative AI to ACR and Christensen said: "With Lightroom and ACR we're trying to ensure that photographers can observe that moment as best they can. When we talk to customers, they feel it's unfortunate if they have 90% of an amazing photo, but it's just that 10% that is not how they remember the scene. Maybe because they couldn't get the camera at the right spot at the right time." He also reiterated that using the generative AI features was completely optional.

The line about making images according to people's memories isn't new; in fact, it's very similar to how phone manufacturers like Samsung and Google are talking about their generative AI features – it's just a bit odd to hear it in reference to an app dedicated to Raw photography. However, Christensen says there's a line between what you can do in ACR, and what you can do in Photoshop. "We are not introducing capabilities like Generative Fill, where you can say 'add an elephant flying from the sky with an umbrella.' That doesn't capture the moment; that's creativity."

Photoshop

This year, Adobe made several of its generative AI tools in Photoshop generally available and added a new "Distraction Removal" tool that can automatically remove wires, cables, and people from images. Removing wires can be done with a single click, while the people mode gives you the chance to refine the selection in case it selected people you still want in the picture, or didn't select people you want to get rid of.

The 'People' mode of the Find Distractions feature lets you decide which subjects you want to keep or to add more subjects to remove.

According to Stephen Nielson, Senior Product Manager for Photoshop, Adobe plans to add an additional mode for the Distraction Removal tool to handle non-human or cable distractions. "The way we've approached this is, first, the most popular thing that people want to remove from a photo is people. So tourists or people in the background or whatever," he said. "And so the categories that we're working on are first: people. Second: cables and wires because they're a pretty specific thing. And then there's a category of basically everything else."

Nielson says the everything else category will be like the people one, where Photoshop will select what it thinks are distractions but let you add to or remove from the selection before hitting the remove button.

It's quite challenging to come up with a single model that can detect all sorts of distractons

Adobe's not currently announcing when that feature will roll out, as it's still in the process of building the model. "It's quite challenging to come up with a single model that can detect all sorts of distractions, whether it's somebody's shoulder that's in the image, or a garbage can, or a pile of leaves, or a random bicycle. It could be anything, right?"

According to Nielson, the training process involved a lot of human work. "We actually give pictures to people and say which objects are distracting?' You do that enough times, and you can train a model to say, 'Hey, this is what people usually say is distracting,'" he said. "That's not the only kind of data that's included in our training data set, but a lot of it is, like, hey, somebody's gone through and annotated data to suggest which objects are distracting."

If you want to use the Remove tool without generative AI, you can.

Like many features in Photoshop, Distraction Removal can take advantage of Adobe's generative AI, though it's not 100% reliant on it. "It actually can either use Content-Aware fill or generative fill technology," said Nielson. "We've built an automatic selector that will, based on what you've selected and you're trying to remove, automatically choose either Content-Aware fill or generative fill, depending on which one's best."

Adobe has also added a drop-down menu that lets you manually select whether you want any part of the Remove tool, including the Distraction Removal feature, to use Generative AI or Content-Aware Fill. Nielson, however, recommended leaving it on auto. "Content-Aware Fill is better for areas with similar textures, areas where there's lots of noise, or higher resolution images. Whereas Generative Fill is really good at details, which Content-Aware Fill just isn't good at. So there's a good use case for both, and the auto selector we have allows the algorithm to choose which one's going to be best."

We think generative technology is huge, but it's not the answer for everything

Nielson thinks Generative AI will play a big part in future Photoshop features, but it won't be the only way the company improves the program. "There's still a lot of areas where we think generative technology is going to dramatically simplify things that were previously tedious and time-consuming inside Photoshop and give you more time to be creative."

The company showed off one such example at its Sneaks presentation, which showcases tech demos that may or may not actually make it into Adobe products in the future. The demo, nicknamed 'Perfect Blend,' automatically matches lighting and color between objects you're photoshopping in to a background.

"But there's also going to be a lot of other non-gen AI improvements that we want to put into Photoshop," Nielson said. "Just making the application run smoother, faster, be more efficient, speed up workflows with non-genitive technology. We think generative technology is huge, but it's not the answer for everything. So, there's a lot of other things that we are planning just to make the app better."

Image: C2PA

It's been a few years since Adobe started testing Content Credentials in Creative Cloud apps, and a year since the company announced it'd use them to mark images generated by its Firefly AI. If you're unfamiliar, Content Credentials aren't just about AI; they're also pitched as a secure way to track how images were created and edited in the hopes of slowing down the spread of misinformation. Adobe bills the system as a "nutrition label" for digital content.

At Adobe's MAX conference, we got to sit down with Andy Parsons, Senior Director of the Content Authenticity Initiative at Adobe, and ask him some questions about Content Credentials. Given the opportunity, it also seemed like a good time to check in with the system.

Content Credentials on the Web

Earlier this year, Adobe began rolling out support for adding Content Credentials to your photos in Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom, and Photoshop. These features are still currently in Early Access or Beta. There's also a Content Credentials verification site that anyone can use to inspect image, video and audio files to see if they have Content Credentials attached or if they've been watermarked with a link to Content Credentials.

However, the company is also looking to make the tech available even to people who don't use its products. This month, it announced a private beta for a Content Authenticity web app. The site lets people who have joined via waitlist upload a JPEG or PNG and attach their name and social media accounts to it after verifying ownership of those accounts by logging in to them. After the person attests that they own the image or have permission to apply credentials to it – there's currently no way to verify that's actually true – it lets them download the image with Content Credentials attached. The tool also lets you attach a piece of metadata, asking companies not to use your image for training AI.

Adobe doesn't aspire to store every content credential in the universe

"From the beginning, before we wrote the first line of code for this tool, we asked creators in the Adobe ecosystem and outside the Adobe ecosystem what they wanted to see in it," said Parsons. "We got a lot of feedback, but we haven't finished this. So the private beta is meant to last a few months, during which we'll collect more feedback."

The system also adds an invisible watermark to the image that links to the credentials stored on Adobe's servers. If someone tries to strip that information out of the image or takes a screenshot of it, it should be recoverable. If someone alters the image, the credentials will theoretically disappear, and the image will no longer be verified as authentic.

"Photoshop users don't want a watermark that somehow changes the look or adds noise to an image that has it. So we did a lot of work to make sure that this was noise-free, that it works with images of very different resolutions and different kinds of color content," Parsons said.

The site is an example of how Content Credentials can work, but if the technology becomes widespread, there'll likely be many more like it. "Adobe doesn't aspire to store every content credential in the universe," Parsons said. "That's why an interoperable standard is so critical. Getty Images could host its own content credential store. Adobe has ours. Someone else could do this on the blockchain; it's really up to the specific platform."

Storing content credentials doesn't require as much storage as it may seem. "We don't store your image; we're not building a massive registry of everyone's content. We store just that 1KB or so of cryptographically signed metadata. And anyone can do that."

Attached Content Credentials are one of the signals Meta looks for when generating its 'AI Info' labels on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

Image: Meta

Some websites have also started using Content Credentials to provide additional context for images and videos. According to Parsons, Meta uses Content Credentials as a signal when applying the "AI Info" label it uses for Instagram, Facebook, and Threads.

YouTube has also begun using Content Credentials to label videos posted on its site. If someone uses a camera or app that attaches credentials to a video and doesn't make any edits to it, the video will receive a "Captured with a camera" label meant to certify that what you're seeing is an unaltered version of what the camera captured.

Adobe also recently released the Adobe Content Authenticity extension for the Chrome browser, which surfaces Content Credentials on any site if it detects images that have them attached. "I think of it as sort of a decoder ring," said Parsons. "Once you install the decoder ring, you can see all the invisible stuff on the web."

The Chrome extension can pick out images with Content Credentials, even if the site they're hosted on doesn't natively tag them.

He anticipates that, someday, the extension won't be necessary and that the information it provides will be more broadly available. "Of course, it really belongs in web browsers and operating systems," he said. "I do anticipate a fair amount of work in the next 12 months going into browser support from folks like Microsoft and Google and others. That's really the big next step."

A not-so-seamless experience

We ran into some strange behavior when testing these tools, though the issues were limited to how they were being displayed – or rather, not displayed – on the web. We added an AI-generated element to two images using Photoshop, then exported and uploaded them to Instagram.

The Content Credentials inspection site properly identified the images as having been edited and showed the changes we'd made. Instagram, however, only added the "AI Info" option to one of them and not the other, despite them having gone through the same chain. The label never showed up when the same images were posted to Threads. When we opened the images on Instagram, Adobe's Chrome extension said there were no images on the page with Credentials attached, though it's worth noting that the tool is still in beta.

We were eventually able to see a history of the edits made to this image after screenshotting it from Instagram, re-uploading it to the verification site, and clicking the "Search for possible matches" button, but that's not exactly a seamless experience.

Adobe's verification site successfully recovered the credentials after we hit the "Search for Possible Matches" button. However, there's clearly still a long way to go before sites can reliably use Content Credentials to provide information about an image's providence or to identify images that were made or altered using AI image generation. That's certainly a bit disappointing, as photographers and artists hoping to use the system to watermark images uploaded to social media as their own can't necessarily rely on it yet.

It's also worth noting that our test was essentially the best-case scenario; we made no efforts to hide that AI was used or to remove the Content Credentials. But while it does show cracks in the ecosystem, Content Credentials not showing up on an image that should have them is a much better outcome than if they had showed up on an image that shouldn't.

New Cameras with Content Credentials

During Adobe Max, Nikon announced that it's bringing Content Credentials to the Z6III at some point next year. During a demo at Adobe Max, images taken with the Z6III had credentials attached verifying the time and date they were taken and information about the ISO, shutter speed, and aperture used.

Currently, it seems like the function will be limited to professional users, such as photojournalists.

What's left to do?

Despite the ecosystem improvements, there's absolutely still work to be done on Content Credentials. When we tested the system in July, we found a surprising lack of interoperability between Lightroom / ACR and Photoshop, and the issue still persists today. If you make edits to an image in Lightroom or ACR, then open it in Photoshop and save the file with Content Credentials, there won't be any information about what you did in ACR or Lightroom. You can work around this by saving the file from Lightroom or ACR as a PNG or JPEG and then opening that in Photoshop, but obviously, that's not an ideal workflow.

That watermarking durability guarantee is important

The tools for incorporating Content Credentials into video are even less mature. Parsons says there are some third-party tools starting to support the metadata, such as streaming video players, and that Adobe is working on applying the invisible watermarks to videos as well. "For us, that watermarking durability guarantee is important. And we'll have video with that – I can't put a date on it, but that's something that we're very focused on. Same for audio."

Then there's the issue of cameras. Even if you have a camera that theoretically supports Content Credentials, such as several of Sony's flagships or the Nikon Z6III, you almost certainly can't use them. Both companies currently treat it as a feature exclusively for businesses, governments and journalists, requiring special firmware and licenses to enable it.

To be fair, those entities are generally the ones producing images where Content Credentials will be the most important. Most photographers' work doesn't require the same level of transparency and scrutiny as images released by law enforcement agencies or photojournalism wire services. However, in an age where news is increasingly documented by regular people using their cell phones, the feature will have to become available to average consumers at some point to have any hope of gaining traction.

I don't think anybody cares how secure a picture of my cat is.

One camera manufacturer is letting people use Content Credentials out of the box: Leica. Its implementation also uses special hardware, similar to Apple's Secure Enclave or Google's Titan chips, which are used to store biometrics and other sensitive data, instead of relying on software. Nikon's Z6III also features hardware support for Content Credentials, unlike the Z8 and Z9. In reference to the information stored on Apple's chip, Parsons said, "Three-letter agencies in the U.S. government don't have access to that, neither does Apple in this case. So that's the vision that we have for cameras." According to him, "If you want ultimate security and a testament to the fact that the camera made a particular image, we'd prefer to see that as a hardware implementation."

He did, however, re-iterate that there are times when that level of security isn't necessary. "If you are the NSA or a government or somebody working in a sensitive area... Maybe somewhere where your identity could be compromised, or you'd be put in harm's way as a photojournalist, you probably do want that level of security. And certain devices need to provide it. Think about a body-cam image versus my picture of my cat. In the former case, it's probably very important because that's likely to see the scrutiny of a court of law, but I don't think anybody cares how secure a picture of my cat is."

Content Credentials and other authenticity systems are only part of building trust in an age of generative AI and widespread misinformation campaigns. "This is not a silver bullet," Parsons said. "It's not solving the totality of the problem. We know from many studies that many organizations have done in many parts of the world that people tend to share what fits their worldview on social media. In many cases, even if they know it's fake. If it fits your point of view and you want to further your point of view, it almost doesn't matter."

"This is not a silver bullet"

Instead, Parsons views Content Credentials as one of the tools people can use when deciding to trust certain sources or pieces of content. "If somebody receives an image that someone has deliberately shared, you know, misinformation or deliberate disinformation, and can tap on that nutrition label and find out for themselves what it is, we think that fulfills a basic right that we all have."

The Leica M Edition 70 kit, with platinum-plated Leica M-A film rangefinder camera, Summicron 50mm F2 ASPH lens, film winder and film canister.

Image: Leica

Leica, which this year is celebrating the 70th anniversary of the first M-series rangefinder camera, has announced a limited edition platinum-plated "Edition 70" film camera set.

The Leica M Edition 70 kit comprises a platinum-plated M-A film rangefinder (the model that most closely resembles the original M3), a Leica APO-Summicron-M 50 f/2 ASPH. lens and a film winder, along with a film canister containing a roll of monochrome film. The set, of which 250 will be made, will cost $22,995 and will be available from "selected" Leica stores.

The Leica M Edition 70 with its platinum-plated camera and lens.

Image: Leica

Although its press release talks in terms of an "investment in the future of analogue photography," it also acknowledges that the kit is likely to appeal to collectors, as well as photographers. A standard black M-A with APO-Summicron lens would set you back $15,190 but the Leicavit fast winder included with the special edition appears not to be available.

For those of us whose budgets don't quite stretch that far, Leica has also announced a $50 coffee table book celebrating the history of the M series, including photos and essays by users of the series. The book "Leica M" will be available from Nov 5th. An exhibition covering seven decades of the M series will begin a day later at the company's headquarters in Wetzlar, Germany.

Press release:

70 years of Leica M: Tradition, Perfection, and Innovation – Leica Camera celebrates the anniversary of the Leica M-System

Teaneck, October 24th, 2024. Iconic and more vibrant than ever: The introduction of the Leica M3 exactly seven decades ago, marked the beginning of the M-System, a milestone in the history of photography that continues today. Launched in 1954, the Leica M3 set new standards with its unique rangefinder, since then the M-System has continuously evolved over the following decades. The legendary Leica M6 featured integrated exposure metering; additional Leica MP models were specially tailored for press photography; the Leica M9 was the first digital full-frame mirrorless camera; and the M (Typ 240) was notable for having a CMOS sensor and for being the first series-produced model without a window for illuminating the viewfinder frames.

The Leica M Monochrom revolutionized digital black-and-white photography, and the Leica M-D was the first digital M to offer a genuine analog experience with the removal of the back display. The current model, the Leica M11, allows direct access to the battery and features a Triple Resolution sensor with a resolution of 60, 36 and 18 megapixels. The Leica M-System has remained both highly compatible and future-proof; for example, the Leica M11-P is the world’s first camera capable of verifying the authenticity of digital images thanks to the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI). This focus on essential features, combined with Leica’s impeccable craftsmanship, ensures quality and consistency – values central to the brand’s core identity. “The quality and craftsmanship of the materials, the sense of precision in every movement, the soft click of the shutter release and the visual clarity of the viewfinder all combine to create an experience that goes far beyond just taking pictures”, says Mark Shipard, Head of Design, Leica Camera AG.

The Leica M camera has long been a favorite among esteemed photographers, who use it for more than just photojournalism and documentary work. In fact, an M is always described as a medium for expressing artistic freedom and individual vision. Countless significant moments have been captured thanks to the Leica M, and their poignancy has been highlighted through powerful, culturally influential photographs. Leica Camera is honored to celebrate seven decades of the Leica M, a tool that is deeply woven in the history of humanity.

“The beauty of the Leica M is that it is so small and therefore discreet and handy to use. Even when people see me using it, they don’t get scared. They don’t see me as a paparazzo – they see me as an artist”, says street photographer Matt Stuart, who was born in London, England.

The limited special edition: “Leica M Edition 70”

The “Leica M Edition 70” was produced as an exclusive special edition to mark the anniversary. This is a unique collector’s item – not just for discerning purists. With a limited release of only 250 sets, the platinum-plated special edition combines classic elegance with precision craftsmanship. It features the iconic design of the legendary Leica M3 created with the manufacturing standards of today. Equipped with a Leica M-A camera, Leica APO-Summicron-M 50 f/2 ASPH. lens, a Leicavit M fast winder and a film container which includes monochrome film, the “Leica M Edition 70” is not only a wonderful homage to the history of the Leica M-System, but also a perfect investment in the future of analogue photography. The combination of timeless design and tried-and-tested craftsmanship, and luxurious platinum coating makes the edition set a coveted item for discerning photographers and collectors.

The “Leica M Edition 70” will be available in selected Leica Stores in 2025. The retail price is $22,995.00.

The anniversary book: “Leica M”

The “Leica M” book is being published in honor of the first 70 years of the Leica M-System. The history of the Leica M-System is presented over more than 250 pages and features insightful essays, legendary photographs, rarely seen archival material and an overview of the Leica M- Cameras produced to date. The result is an impressive homage, that vividly portrays the complexity and many layers of the Leica M-System’s development over 70 years.

“This book is also a huge ‘thank you’ to all the people who worked with the M and on the M: photographers, employees, customers, and friends of what we call ‘the Leica family,’” sums up Dr. Andreas Kaufmann, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Leica Camera AG.

The “Leica M” book will be available globally in Leica Stores, the Leica Online Store, the LFI (Leica Fotografie International) Online Store, and select authorized dealers starting on November 5th, 2024. The retail price is $50.00.

The anniversary exhibition

The Leica M-System has been inspiring photographers for seven decades with its exemplary aesthetics, compact design, manual operation, precise optics and unique image quality. On November 6th, 2024, an extensive special exhibition opens to the public at Leica Camera AG’s headquarters in Wetzlar, featuring historic Leica M-Camera models and exciting insights into its production history with original documents and iconic photographs. Visitors will be able to experience the history of photography and enjoy an impressive presentation of the Leica M- System’s path from 1954 to the present day.

For more information on “70 years of Leica,” visit: leica-camera.com/70-years-m

When you use DPReview links to buy products, the site may earn a commission. Image: Lomography

Lomography, the company behind many retro-inspired film cameras and film stocks, has announced the Lomo'Instant Wide Glass, which it claims is the world's sharpest instant camera.

The Lomo'Instant Wide Glass features a 90mm (∼35mm equiv. in full-frame terms) F8 lens featuring multi-coated glass elements. The lens can be stopped down to a fixed F22 aperture for greater depth of field, and it has a close focus distance is 0.3m (1ft).

The camera includes programmable aperture and shutter modes, manual exposure compensation and flash controls, and supports multiple and long exposures. It has a built-in flash, but a PC-sync connection allows the camera to be used with an external flash.

Sample galleryThis widget is not optimized for RSS feed readers. Click here to open it in a new browser window / tab. Sample photos provided by Lomography

Included accessories include Lomography's Splitzer attachment, a remote control lens cap, which features a shutter release button and timer switch, and colored gel filters.

According to the company's press materials, "the camera is well-suited for capturing detailed portraits or expansive editorial shots." Leaning into its claim about being the world's sharpest instant camera, it says, "It captures even the finest details – down to the tiniest freckle on a model's face."

The Lomo'Instant Wide Glass is available now at a retail price of $279.

Buy now:

$279 at Lomography

When you use DPReview links to buy products, the site may earn a commission.

Updated: Nov 24, 2024

$1500 or the equivalent in your local currency is a lot to spend on a camera, especially when you're just starting out. However, if you can spare the funds, it's the price bracket where cameras start to get really good. You can expect powerful but easy-to-use autofocus systems, cameras that make it easier than ever to learn the craft of photography, and even some more advanced and capable options.

The biggest decision will likely be whether to go with a full-frame camera – a name that comes from their sensors being the same size as a frame of 35mm film – or a camera with a smaller APS-C or Micro Four Thirds sensor. Full-frame cameras have the highest potential image quality, but to get the most out of them, you'll have to buy full-frame lenses, which tend to be bigger, heavier and more expensive than similar APS-C lenses covering the same range.

Essentially, choosing a sensor size comes with trade-offs between size, price, and image quality, as well as features. If you spend $1,500 on a full-frame camera, you'll be getting one of the most stripped-down models, whereas a similarly-priced APS-C camera will be packed to the gills with features and capabilities.

After extensive use, the following cameras would be our picks in this price range:

Our picks:

• Best camera for under $1500: Canon EOS R8
• Enjoyable to shoot with: Nikon Z5
• Most versatile option: Sony a6700
• The affordable kit: OM System OM-5

Best camera for under $1500: Canon EOS R8

24 MP full-frame CMOS sensor | 4K/60p 10-bit video recording | 8 fps burst shooting

The EOS R8 is one of the most affordable ways to gain the image quality benefits of a full-frame sensor. Lens availability is a concern, but it's a capable and enjoyable camera to use.

Photo: Richard Butler

Buy now:

$1499 at Amazon.com$1499 at Adorama$1499 at B&H Photo What we like:

• Great image quality
• Very good AF subject detection and tracking
• Good starting price

What we don't:

• No in-body image stabilization
• Short battery life
• No AF joystick

The Canon EOS R8 is a surprisingly capable compact full-frame mirrorless camera that has the features and image quality of Canon's EOS R6 II at a much lower price.

The EOS R8 has a comfortable grip and twin dials, giving a good level of direct control. There aren't many buttons so more committed users may want to move up to the EOS R6 II, rather than rely on the quick menu for changing settings. Autofocus is the R8's strong suit: tracking and subject detection are simple to use and very effective. There's no AF joystick, so you'll have to use the touchscreen or select a subject and recompose. Battery life is very limited for an entry-level full-frame camera, though it can charge over USB, at least. "If you're partial to Canon and are new to full-frame mirrorless, the EOS R8 is a great place to start your photographic journey." The R8 shoots attractive video, including 4K footage at up to 60p. The lack of in-body stabilization means you'll need a stabilized lens or a tripod to get the best results. Photos are on par with more expensive full-frame cameras, with great high ISO performance, detail-preserving noise reduction, and Canon's pleasing JPEG colors. The 40 fps burst mode is prone to rolling shutter distortion, reducing its usefulness for capturing action. The EOS R8 offers the image quality and many of the features of Canon's more expensive models but battery life, viewfinder resolution and lack of sensor stabilization are part of the price you pay for that. The RF mount is still fairly new so it's worth researching your lens options before buying, but an adapter allows the use of EF DSLR lenses if you have them.

Read our full review of the Canon EOS R8

See the Canon EOS R8 studio scene

Sample galleryThis widget is not optimized for RSS feed readers. Please open this article's permalink in a browser to view this content. Enjoyable to shoot with: Nikon Z5

24MP full-frame sensor | In-body image stabilization | 4K/30p video

The Nikon Z5's view and autofocus aren't as good as those of the Canon EOS R8 but it can be nicer to use in some regards, not least thanks to its larger battery and high-res viewfinder.

Photo: Dan Bracaglia

Buy now:

$1296 at Amazon.com$1396 at Adorama$1396 at B&H Photo What we like:

• Excellent image quality
• Superb build quality
• Effective image stabilization

What we don't:

• 4K video has heavy crop
• Heavy-handed high ISO noise reduction
• Noticeable rolling shutter

We also really liked the Nikon Z5, which sells for around the same price as the Canon.

The Nikon Z5 is among the most affordable entry-level full-frame cameras ever released. It sports a stabilized 24MP CMOS chip with on-sensor phase detect AF, packed inside a robust, best-in-class body. "The Z5 is good for anyone seeking a well-priced, stills-oriented full-frame mirrorless camera"

Its autofocus isn't quite as reliable as the R8's and its video is nowhere near as good, but if anything we find it a slightly more enjoyable camera to actually use and it offers in-body image stabilization, which the Canon lacks. It has a higher resolution viewfinder and a joystick for positioning its autofocus point, which makes a surprisingly big difference to usability. It also offers significantly better battery life than the Canon, which is another nice-to-have feature.

Read our full Nikon Z5 review

See our Nikon Z5 studio scene

Sample galleryThis widget is not optimized for RSS feed readers. Please open this article's permalink in a browser to view this content. Other full-frame cameras we considered

The Nikon Z6 II is essentially a slightly upgraded Z5. It's priced just outside the scope of this article but will almost certainly go on sale for around $1500 or less throughout the year. If you're serious about video the EOS R8 is still the better pick, but if you just want to shoot uncropped 4K/30p occasionally, the Z6 II may be worth considering.

We also considered the Sony a7 II, which is still available at some very tempting looking prices. This isn't the bargain it might seem. The a7 II was launched in late 2014 and cameras have come a long way since then. Sony has updated the autofocus, menus and ergonomics of the a7 series significantly since the launch of the a7 II, and has adopted a much larger battery, all of which are worth spending more money to gain. Sony's E-mount has the widest selection of lenses of any mirrorless system, but we'd recommend saving for an a7 III instead of buying the a7 II these days.

Most versatile option: Sony a6700

26MP BSI CMOS sensor | 4K/60p video capture | Fully articulating screen

The Sony a6700 combines all-round stills and video capabilities with class-leading autofocus. The standard 16-50mm kit zoom's not great, though.

Photo: Richard Butler

Buy now:

$1398 at Amazon.com$1398 at Adorama$1398 at B&H Photo What we like:

• Front and rear command dials
• Excellent AF in stills and video
• 4K/120p capture (with crop)

What we don't:

• No AF joystick
• JPEG sharpening can be aggressive

The Sony a6700 is an enthusiast-level APS-C mirrorless camera built around an image-stabilized, 26MP BSI CMOS sensor. It includes an impressive collection of features for both photo and video shooters.

The a6700 has a thumb-and-forefinger dial interface missing from Sony's less expensive models. It’s just slightly larger than previous models in the line, but in exchange, you also get a fully articulating display. However, it lacks the AF joystick found on many cameras in its class. Autofocus on the a6700 offers class-leading subject detection and tracking capabilities. Combined with a dedicated ‘AI’ processor, it effectively tracks subjects around the frame even when shooting at the maximum 11 fps burst shooting rate. "Excellent photo and video quality with best-in-class AF in stills and video make it an excellent choice for enthusiasts." Image quality is very good in JPEG or Raw. JPEG colors are pleasing to the eye, though sharpening can be a bit aggressive. Base ISO noise levels are consistent with other modern APS-C models but in low light it exhibits a little more noise. The camera produces very detailed 4K video up to 60p with 10-bit color, with good rolling shutter performance. There’s also a 4K/120p mode, albeit with a 1.58x crop. Autofocus performance is top-notch, with a well-designed touch interface. It's a strong option both for videographers and vloggers. Excellent photo and video quality, best-in-class AF in stills and video, and a deep set of features to support both make it an excellent choice for enthusiasts. Sony's E-mount also includes a good range of available lenses.

Read our full Sony a6700 review

See the Sony a6700 studio scene

Sample galleryThis widget is not optimized for RSS feed readers. Please open this article's permalink in a browser to view this content. Other APS-C cameras worth considering

Fujifilm's X-T50 is a good choice for beginner photographers thanks to its easily accessible auto mode, well-rounded specifications, and film simulation dial to encourage you to experiment with the look and feel of your images. It's also available with Fujifilm's 16-50mm F2.8-4.8 kit lens, which is much more capable than the typical kit lens and is compatible with the rest of the robust X-mount lens ecosystem. However, its autofocus tracking performance isn't as strong as Sony's or Canon's.

The Canon EOS R7 is also an excellent option, providing a high-resolution sensor, great autofocus, and the ability to shoot at up to 15fps. Sigma has also recently started making APS-C lenses for RF mount, giving those who want to go beyond the kit lens more options, though there's still no particularly great telephoto option for sports and wildlife photographers.

The affordable kit: OM System OM-5

20MP Four Thirds CMOS sensor | 4K/30p video | In-body stabilization rated to 6.5EV (7.5 with some lenses)

The OM-5 offers a smaller, more rugged alternative to APS-C or full-frame cameras.

Photo: Brendan Nystedt

Buy now:

$1299 w/ 12-45mm F4.0 at Amazon.com$999 at Adorama$1299 w/ 12-45mm F4.0 at B&H Photo

Even smaller than APS-C are Four Thirds sensors. The Micro Four Thirds system uses a sensor one quarter the size of that in 'full-frame,' which means there'll be an appreciable image quality hit in many situations and it'll be harder to achieve the blurry backgrounds that full-frame can give. The flipside, though is a significantly smaller system for which some of the lenses are much less expensive.

What we like:

• Attractive JPEG output
• Selection of clever photo features
• Excellent image stabilization
• IP53 rating supports claims of weather sealing

What we don't:

• AF tracking is disappointing
• Image quality is behind larger sensor cameras

The OM System OM-5 is a compact 20MP image-stabilized Micro Four Thirds mirrorless camera. And while most cameras in this list are $1500 on their own, you can easily get the OM-5 and a lens while still staying within that budget.

The OM-5 has a compact body but a decent number of control points and offers a high degree of customization. Its menu system is quite cluttered by the camera's extensive array of features. Viewfinder and rear screen are typical for the price. It has good phase-detect autofocus with face detection, but tracking for other subjects is distinctly unreliable. Using a single point or zone of focus and trying to keep up with the subject yields best results, but is somewhat awkward due to the lack of an AF joystick. "Its combination of IP-rated weather sealing, image stabilization and compact size helps the OM-5 offer something different" Image quality is good for its sensor size, with attractive JPEGs and flexible Raw files. A 12-shot handheld high-res mode lets it punch above its weight if your scene has relatively little movement. Excellent image stabilization expands the camera's working range, and unique features like Live ND mean you rarely need a tripod. The OM-5's 4K video isn't the most detailed, but this is made up for by some of the best image stabilization on the market, making the OM-5 a competent hand-held video option. Video AF tracks faces and people decently, but can struggle with other kinds of subjects. The OM-5 offers strong all-round capability with excellent image stabilization in a compact IP53-rated weather-sealed body and access to one of the largest mirrorless camera lens systems.

Read our OM System OM-5 review

See the OM System OM-5 studio scene

Sample galleryThis widget is not optimized for RSS feed readers. Please open this article's permalink in a browser to view this content. Why you should trust us

This buying guide is based on cameras used and tested by DPReview's editorial team. We don't select a camera until we've used it enough to be confident in recommending it, usually after our extensive review process. The selections are purely a reflection of which cameras we believe to be best: there are no financial incentives for us to select one model or brand over another.

When you use DPReview links to buy products, the site may earn a commission. Image: Insta360

Insta360 has announced the Ace Pro 2, its newest action camera and successor to its Ace Pro model. Although similar in appearance to its predecessor, the Ace Pro 2 includes some notable upgrades.

The Ace Pro 2's camera is built around a Type 1/1.3 (9.6 x 7.2mm) image sensor, which can capture up to 8K video or 50MP photos. Insta360 claims the camera can deliver up to 13.5 stops of dynamic range. The camera is co-engineered by Leica and includes a Summarit-branded F2.6 lens with a 157° FOV (13mm equiv).

In video mode, the Ace Pro 2 can capture up to 8K/30p (16:9) or 4K/60p (4:3 or 16:9) using Insta360's Active HDR technology or up to 4K/120p or 1080/240p without Active HDR and supports both the H.264 and H.265 codecs. For photos, the camera supports both JPEG and DNG Raw capture.

Image: Insta360

Other recording features include a pre-capture mode that can record up to 120 seconds of video before hitting the record button, gesture and voice control, and the ability to pause/resume recording. Insta360 says that Leica engineered the camera's color profiles.

The Ace Pro 2 also includes Insta360's FlowState stabilization technology designed to minimize or remove camera shake for smoother video. A 360° horizon lock can be applied in-camera to keep the horizon level while shooting.

The camera also gains a slightly larger 2.5" LCD flip screen for self-capture, up from its predecessor's 2.4" screen. Insta360 doesn't provide screen resolution in the camera's specifications but claims the new screen has a 70% increase in pixel density and a 6% increase in brightness.

According to Insta360, the Ace Pro 2 is the first action camera with dual AI processors: a dedicated processor to handle image processing and noise reduction and a second processor to handle further image processing and to deliver a smoother user experience on the camera.

Image: Insta360

The dual processors also enable some of the more demanding shooting modes like 8K/30p, 4K/60p with Active HDR and upgraded PureVideo, which the company describes as "A specialized shooting mode that drastically reduces noise and enhances details in real time for cleaner, brighter images, even in extreme low light." Insta360 says that PureVideo uses a custom-trained AI neural network to deliver better low-light results and when using Active HDR.

The Ace Pro 2 is waterproof to 12m (39 ft.), up from 10m for its predecessor, and up to 60m (197 ft.) when used with Insta360's dive case for the camera. It includes a new wind guard to reduce wind noise, a removable lens guard, and features Insta360's magnetic mount system. The camera is rated for use in temperatures down to -20°C (-4°F).

The Ace Pro 2 also gains a new, higher capacity 1800mAh battery. When using the new Endurance Mode, Insta360 claims that the camera will provide 50% longer runtime than its predecessor when shooting 4K/30p and quotes a maximum runtime of 180 minutes (based on 1080p video capture). The battery can charge to 80% in 18 minutes or 100% in 47 minutes.

Image: Insta360

Once video is captured, the Ace Pro 2 uses AI to help users create and share content. The AI Highlights Assistant is designed to automatically find the best moments from captured videos, which can be reviewed on the camera, after which the Auto Edit feature will create a recap video. Insta360 has also expanded compatibility with third-party sports accessories and apps from companies like Apple, Garmin, Nike Run Club and COROS to enable the overlay of real-time information and statistics.

Price and availability

The Insta360 Ace Pro 2 is available beginning today. The standard bundle, which includes a wind guard, battery, standard mount, mic cap and USB-C cable, retails for $399. A dual-battery bundle, which consists of the same accessories but with two batteries, retails for $419.

Meet Insta360 Ace Pro 2: Redefining Action Cameras With Unrivaled 8K Image Quality & Smarter AI

Insta360 is thrilled to announce the latest addition to its Ace series, Insta360 Ace Pro 2. This groundbreaking wide-angle action camera delivers unparalleled image quality, smarter, easier capture powered by AI, upgraded audio, and an improved rugged design made for action at its most extreme.

Co-engineered with Leica, it delivers serious performance upgrades with the sophisticated dual AI chip, a first for any action camera, and state-of-the-art imaging courtesy of a new 1/1.3" 8K sensor and Leica SUMMARIT lens with a 157º field of view. Creators can experience smoother videos with higher frame rates at 8K30fps and 4K60fps Active HDR, PureVideo for excellent low light performance, a bigger 2.5" flip touchscreen and more.

The action camera utilizes Insta360's advanced AI technology to offer a smarter experience from shooting to sharing. Innovative functions like the option to pause or cancel a recording, gesture and voice control, Auto Edit and AI Highlights Assistant completely transform the experience for creators. With no more complex workflows, anyone can experience a simpler way to film and spend more time immersed in the moments they love.

Insta360 Ace Pro 2 significantly improves on its design, offering a more rugged, reliable action camera. Its waterproofing has increased to 39ft (12m), and it offers crystal-clear audio with a new Wind Guard and a removable Lens Guard to handle whatever you throw at it, providing full flexibility for action and sports enthusiasts.

"Our goal was to refine and enhance the groundbreaking features of the original Insta360 Ace Pro to deliver an unparalleled experience," says JK Liu, founder of Insta360. "We are confident these upgrades establish a new industry standard. Not only do they bring significant advances in AI, they empower creators to capture what was always impossible with other action cameras, opening the door to unprecedented creative potential."

Insta360 Ace Pro 2 is available to order today via Insta360.com worldwide, as well as trusted retailers such as Amazon and select authorized partners.

Unparalleled Image Quality, Day and Night

Legendary Leica optics once again meets Insta360 innovation in the form of a SUMMARIT lens, setting it apart from competitors with its state-of-the-art image quality. Combined with an upgraded 1/1.3" 8K sensor offering 13.5 stops of dynamic range, Insta360 Ace Pro 2 delivers simply breathtaking visuals in situations other action cameras simply can't handle.

Further contributing to its image quality and performance is the industry-leading dual-chip design. Insta360 Ace Pro 2 is the first action camera with a dedicated Pro Imaging Chip that handles image processing and noise reduction, while a separate 5nm AI Chip handles further image processing and overall camera performance, providing a smooth, seamless user experience. The dual chip also enables more shooting modes and higher specifications, such as 8K30fps video, 4K60fps Active HDR, and upgraded PureVideo. Even in fast-moving motion and high-intensity action, creators can enjoy smooth, sharp videos thanks to the higher frame rates or slow it all the way down with crisp 4K120fps slow motion.

A complex, custom-trained AI neural network underpins PureVideo, a specialized shooting mode that drastically reduces noise and enhances details in real time for cleaner, brighter images, even in extreme low light. Whether it's twilight strolls or evening rides, creators can record what they never could before. For the daytime, upgraded 4K60fps Active HDR (High Dynamic Range) brings out all the details in intense highlights and shadows for more vibrant footage. Meanwhile, a wider 157° FOV captures more of the surroundings, perfect for vlogging or when the scenery really matters.

Exclusive Leica-engineered color profiles infuse footage with their signature aesthetic, adding a touch of elegance to every shot. Insta360's devotion to color accuracy is seen elsewhere with Insta360 Ace Pro 2's ability to retain rich and precise colors, even underwater.

Ready for Action Anytime, Anywhere

The upgraded design proves to be even more rugged, ready for when you ramp up the action. Waterproofing has increased to 39 feet (12 meters) or 197 feet (60 meters) with the Dive Case, and it handles temperatures as low as -4ºF (-20ºC) with ease, perfect for winter sports and extreme climates.

The new, removable Lens Guard provides greater all-around protection, meaning creators can feel confident to push the limits further and capture the impossible, knowing their action cam is up to the challenge.

An all-new Wind Guard keeps wind and noise at a minimum during those peak moments, ready to snap on and off as you need. With refreshed audio algorithms bringing professional-grade clarity to your content, you can immerse your viewers like never before. What's more, the magnetic mounting system lets you seamlessly switch between accessories. Less time spent unscrewing and screwing your camera and mounts, more time in the moment.

Insta360's leading FlowState Stabilization technology ensures videos remain incredibly smooth no matter what, while 360º Horizon Lock, now applied automatically in-camera, keeps everything perfectly level. Prioritizing performance and convenience, Insta360 Ace Pro 2 sports a bigger 1800mAh battery and a new Endurance Mode that offers a 50% longer runtime at 4K30fps than Insta360 Ace Pro. Fast charging powers the battery to 80% in 18 minutes or 100% in 47 minutes, so you can get back to the action quicker.

Insta360 has expanded its compatibility with several top third-party sports accessories, allowing action and sports enthusiasts to add a new level of detail. For data-rich videos, overlay real-time stats from third-party sports brands and apps, including Garmin, Apple, COROS, Nike Run Club, and more. For moto vloggers, pair Insta360 Ace Pro 2 with your motorcycle helmet headset from Sena, Cardo, and more for clear dual-track audio and hands-free control every ride. Alternatively, users can add stats from their phone directly in the Insta360 app without any extra gear, or use the GPS Preview Remote for easy live preview, remote control, and real-time GPS data.

Made for those who demand the highest standard of action capture, Insta360 Ace Pro 2 offers the perfect combination of durability and high-quality performance to capture life's thrills with confidence.

Smarter, Easier Capture & Editing

Insta360 Ace Pro's flip touchscreen proved an essential and convenient tool for creators and has been further upgraded to 2.5 inches. With a 70% increase in pixel density and a 6% increase in brightness, it allows for perfect framing and easier preview for vlogging, selfies, and difficult angles, all while remaining visible under bright sunlight. Instead of guessing if your shot looks perfect, you can shoot with confidence, knowing it is.

Internally, Ace Pro offers innovative solutions to problems that have hindered action enthusiasts for years:

• 4K Clarity Zoom - Want a close-up but the image quality becomes too grainy? Zoom in and out 2x without losing quality.
• Pre-Recording - Never miss a moment with up to 120 seconds of footage saved before you even hit record.
• Gesture & Voice Control - Use quick hand signals or verbal commands to control the camera, such as start/stop recording or take a photo, ideal if it's mounted out of reach.
• Pause/Resume Recording - Got time between shots? Hit pause and continue recording when you need to keep everything in one continuous file for easier file management and editing.
• Timecode - Seamlessly synchronizes multiple cameras for an efficient editing workflow.

Insta360's revolutionary AI features demonstrate a commitment to making shooting and editing as accessible as possible. Anyone, regardless of their skill level, will be amazed at what they can create. For those who aren't confident editing, AI Highlights Assistant automatically finds the best moments from a video and delivers the highlights for review, all in-camera. Creators can merge every thrilling moment into one incredible recap or choose the ones their favorites and delete any unwanted clips to save storage.

The Assistant also helps craft your next reel from your adventures and pushes it directly to your smartphone via the Insta360 app. Look back on all your Memories and share those unforgettable moments in seconds.

Acting as a full editing suite in your pocket, the Insta360 mobile app fully embraces the game-changing possibilities of AI with advanced Auto Editing, one-tap templates and creative Shot Lab effects. Instead of spending hours learning complex tools and editing workflows, AI does it all for you, bringing your clips to life with dynamic cuts and transitions. Creators can even achieve the infamous Invisible Selfie Stick effect with the AI Selfie Stick Eraser in the app for third-person views. Looking for a real twist? AI Warp uses preset or custom keywords to bring your wildest ideas to life.

Available Now

Insta360 Ace Pro 2 is available to purchase today worldwide via Insta360.com, Amazon, and select retailers. The Standard Bundle retails for US$399.99 and includes a Wind Guard, battery, Standard Mount, Mic Cap, and USB-C Cable. The Dual Battery Bundle includes the same accessories and two batteries for US$419.99.

When you use DPReview links to buy products, the site may earn a commission.

The SL3 mirrorless model will be the first Leica to gain Camera to Cloud capabilities

Photo: Richard Butler

Leica has announced it's collaborating with Adobe to add the Camera to Cloud Frame.io upload feature to its "portfolio."

The rollout will begin with the SL3 model, as discussed at the Adobe MAX event last week.

Interestingly the company specifies that the feature will be coming to its "mirrorless system cameras" which would exclude both the D-Lux8 and Q3 compacts. However, we'd be surprised if the Q3 models don't eventually gain the feature, given how similar their underlying firmware and processors are to the SL3. The implication appears to be that M models could gain the feature, though.

Camera to Cloud, first offered by Fujifilm, has more recently been adopted by Panasonic, with which Leica has a technology development collaboration.

Notably, Leica was the first camera maker to offer one of the other much-discussed features at Adobe MAX: the ability to embed Content Authentication Initiative-compliant 'Content Credentials.'

Press Release:

Leica Camera AG collaborates with Adobe to Bring Frame.io’s Camera to Cloud Capabilities to its Portfolio

Wetzlar/Miami, October 2024. At Adobe MAX – the world’s largest creativity conference – Adobe and Leica Camera AG announced the integration of Adobe’s Frame.io Camera to Cloud technology into selected Leica mirrorless system cameras, starting with the SL3 camera in 2025. Frame.io’s Camera to Cloud platform is the fastest and most secure way to get media from the set to the people who need to work with it.

Nico Köhler, Head of Product Experience at Leica Camera: “Collaborating with our partners from Adobe again, marks a significant milestone in the continuous pursuit of innovation at Leica, providing photographers and videographers with seamless workflow solutions. The inclusion of Frame.io Camera to Cloud in the Leica SL3 enhances this commitment for offering increased speed and flexibility that empowers professionals in both photography and videography.”

Thanks to the Frame.io integration, Leica users will be able to deliver assets to social media within minutes, provide same-day delivery of photos and videos for events, and enable real- time collaboration and efficient approval processes with clients. The integration of Frame.io Camera to Cloud will be provided via Firmware Update with the Leica FOTOS App or on the Leica Corporate Website in 2025.

The Lowepro Photo Sport 300 AW II alongside the Panasonic GH7 with 12-60mm F2.8-4 and Olympus 40-150mm F2.8 Pro for scale.

Photo: Dale Baskin

We don't usually test a product for a decade before reviewing it, but in the case of the Lowepro Photo Sport 300 AW II camera pack, I'm going to do precisely that. Why? Because this is a piece of gear I genuinely love. Over the past ten years, I've probably used it as much as any other product I own, except for my mobile phone.

I've auditioned many camera packs: I've bought some, borrowed some, tried packs that came through the DPReview offices and built my own DIY solutions. None worked as well for me as the Photo Sport 300 AW II.

Let's agree up front that there's no such thing as a perfect camera pack, but I'll explain why this pack has traveled everywhere with me for ten years. This long-term review is based on my own experience using the Photo Sport 300 AW II for a decade.

Lowepro Photo Sport 300 AW II overview

The Photo Sport 300 AW II backpack is part of Lowepro's 'Photo Sport' line, aimed at hikers and outdoor enthusiasts, and it looks more like an outdoor pack than a camera pack.

A configurable camera cube sits at the bottom of the pack, accessed through a side panel. It provides adequate space for most full-frame mirrorless cameras, like a Sony a7, Nikon Z6, or Canon R6, with a lens attached, along with a second lens.

The configurable camera cube has enough space for most full-frame (or similarly sized) mirrorless cameras and a second lens as long as it's not a big telephoto. Don't plan on putting a Nikon Z9 or Canon R1 in it, though.

Photo: Dale Baskin

The upper section of the pack is top-loading and closes with a drawstring, similar to many climbing packs. The top flap includes an integrated storage compartment, and the side has a pocket for carrying a water bottle or a small tripod.

There's also a 2-liter compartment for a water reservoir. A small compartment on the bottom hides a very capable rain cover, so it's always with you.

The upper section of the pack closes with a drawstring, similar to some climbing packs. You can stuff a lot of gear inside as long as you don't mind the pack getting a little bit taller.

Photo: Dale Baskin

The back panel is pretty minimalist. It doesn't have a mesh design for ventilation, which I know many people like, but I prefer the simpler design. I've never found it too hot, even in the Amazon jungle. After years of hiking with it, I've worn through the fabric right down to the padding, but it still works great.

The back panel has a minimalist design, but I find it still breaths well and keeps the pack compact. At the bottom, you can see where I've worn through the fabric after years of daily use.

Photo: Dale Baskin

Lowepro no longer makes this exact model; its successor, the Photo Sport Outdoor Backpack BP 24L AW III, has a similar design and should perform similarly. You can read our full review of the Photo Sport 24L AW III to learn more about it.

Buy the Photo Sport Outdoor Backpack 24L AW III: $249 at Amazon $249 at B&H $249 at Adorama What I like

For me, the Photo Sport 300 AW II is a Goldilocks product: it provides just the right balance between camera storage and space for other gear.

I keep using it for three primary reasons: lifestyle, durability and flexibility.

Lifestyle

The Photo Sport 300 AW II works so well for me because it's a good match for my lifestyle, and that's a good guiding principle for any camera pack. I often travel with a combination of camera and non-camera gear, and I generally pack pretty light.

I've become more efficient with gear over the years, and despite anxiety about not having every possible focal length in my bag, I've learned to work with a single body and just one or two lenses most of the time. If I need something extra, I put it in a padded case in the top of the pack.

I live in the Pacific Northwest, so my lifestyle often includes rain. Thanks to a hidden compartment in the base of the pack, the very effective rain cover is always with me.

Photo: Dale Baskin

The side panel access makes getting to my cameras quick and easy. I realize this is a polarizing aspect of camera pack design, but this design works for me on this pack. I would choose something other than side access on a pack meant to carry multiple bodies and lenses, but on this pack, it works very naturally for me.

Durability

This pack is tough as hell and never failed me despite being subjected to a lot of abuse. It's been used almost every day for ten years, and it still feels like it has years left in it.

It's been dragged through taiga forests in the sub-arctic and the mud of tropical jungles. It's been stuffed into cargo bins on buses, tied to the roofs of minivans going over mountain passes in snowstorms, traveled around the Amazon in open canoes, bungied to the backs of motorcycles and tied to tuk-tuks. It has the dirt and grime to prove it.

My pack has the dirt and grime to prove it's been used and abused. It's a far cry from the bright blue color it had when I bought it.

Photo: Dale Baskin

In short, this is a bag I trust.

It's showing some wear and tear. A couple of fabric spots in the pack's interior are a bit frayed, and the bottom of the water bottle pocket has small holes from being scraped on the ground too many times. But everywhere it really matters – the straps, zippers, and any critical points of attachment – it's stitched to last and as solid as the day I bought it.

Flexibility

The Photo Sport 300 AW II is relatively compact when needed, but the main compartment holds a larger volume than you would expect as a result of its similarity to a climbing pack. However, I've never had trouble fitting it under an airplane seat (as long as I haven't stuffed it too full).

There's a compartment for a water reservoir, but I've found it works equally well for a 13-14" laptop computer, and I currently use it to carry a 14" MacBook Pro.

The hydration compartment works equally well for carrying a water reservoir or a laptop computer. My 14" MacBook Pro slides right in, though I have to spread the straps a bit to do it.

Photo: Dale Baskin

In those rare cases where I don't want to carry camera gear (hey, it happens), I like that I can squish the padded cube to take up less space, allowing me to use it as a regular daypack.

Finally, this pack doesn't scream 'camera bag'! Most people will likely think it's a daypack rather than a camera pack, making it easier to blend in. Those in the know will recognize the Lowepro name if they see it, but the logo is pretty small and subtle.

Things I'd like to see improved

I like the Photo Sport 300 AW II a lot, but there are a few things I'd like to see improved.

I often use the side pocket to carry a compact tripod, like the Peak Design Travel Tripod. However, the side strap that secures the tripod's top is too high for many travel tripods. As a result, I also use the strap from the top panel to help secure the tripod, but it's an imperfect solution.

I often carry a travel tripod in the side pocket, but the blue strap that secures the top is just a little bit too high to reliably hold it in place.

Photo: Dale Baskin

I wish the hip bet were removable. I use the hip belt for hiking, but the pack is so versatile that I also use it for travel, where I don't want the hip belt hanging off my back while riding trains or walking through a foreign city.

Finally, I wish the camera cube was removable when not carrying photo gear. Fortunately, Lowepro also figured this out: the cube is removable in later versions of the pack I've seen, which seems to have carried through to the newer model(s).

The final word

Finding the right camera pack is one of the most elusive things in photography – more difficult than finding the right camera, in my opinion. That explains why so many photographers have a closet full of them. I'm thrilled to have found one that works so well for me.

Most people won't recognize the Photo Sport 300 AW II as a camera backpack. Those in the know will recognize the Lowepro logo, but it's relatively small.

Photo: Dale Baskin

Despite my affinity for the Photo Sport 300 AW II, I'll be the first to tell you it's not the best bag for every situation. If I'm on a shoot that requires multiple bodies and lenses or a bunch of video gear, I'll use an appropriate pack. But the Photo Sport 300 AW II is my daily driver for most activities, even ones that don't involve photography.

Lowepro no longer sells this exact model, but the Photo Sport Outdoor Backpack 24L AW III that replaces it is very similar, albeit slightly smaller. I suspect most of my observations about the Photo Sport 300 AW II would also apply to it.

You've heard from me, so now I want to hear from you. In the comments section below, tell me what your favorite camera pack is and why you love it!

Buy the Photo Sport Outdoor Backpack 24L AW III: $249 at Amazon $249 at B&H $249 at Adorama

Images: Logitech, Apple, SmallRig

Hello everyone! It's been a busy week here at DPReview, and the same has apparently been true for accessory makers. Today we’ll be looking at some stylish accessories for Fujifilm’s new entry-level camera, some computer accessories that may make editing easier, another digital photo frame, and more. First, though, let’s see what’s on sale.

A Couple of Canons

The Canon EOS R7, which won our Silver award last year, is currently $200 off. It's also worth noting that the main thing that kept it from getting Gold was the lack of RF-mount lenses that made sense for an APS-C camera, but that situation has been someone improved now that Sigma has released several of its F2.8 'Contemporary' zoom lenses for the system.

Buy now:

Buy at B&H PhotoBuy at AdoramaBuy w/ RF-S18-150mm F3.5-6.3 IS STM at Amazon.com Photo: Dale Baskin

If you're looking for a full-frame option, the gold-winning EOS R6 Mark II is also currently on sale at $500 MSRP.

Buy now:

$2099 at Amazon.com$2499 at B&H Photo$2499 at Adorama Vintage-looking clothes for a brand-new camera

The case looks especially good with the black X-M5, though unfortunately, that model isn't shipping until April.

Image: SmallRig

Fujifilm's new X-M5 hasn't even hit store shelves yet, but SmallRig has already announced new accessories for it. There are the usual suspects, like an L-shaped handle that adds more grip and a thumb grip accessory, but there are also some more stylish options meant to match the camera's retro aesthetic. Perhaps the most classic is the half leather case that's meant to evoke classic rangefinders and which comes with a new braided wrist strap. The latter can, of course, be used with pretty much any camera and SmallRig is selling it standalone as well.

$36.99 at SmallRig

There's probably a bit of irony in using such retro-styled accessories on a vlogging-focused camera with no viewfinder, but it's hard to deny how stylish they are.

Image: SmallRig

There's also a 'Retro Cage,' which is made to look like aged bronze and features gold-colored accents. It also includes a wooden hand grip section. Outside of the looks, it's a pretty standard cage, adding several mounting points to the camera for those who are serious about rigging it up for video use. The cage and the L-mount kits also include a fuzzy windscreen that clips onto the hot shoe mount, which should help cut down on the amount of wind noise picked up by the X-M5's three microphones.

$84.90 at SmallRig An ultra-portable editing tool Image: Apple

It’s no secret that a lot of photographers love editing photos on an iPad using an Apple Pencil, especially now that it’s super easy to connect a camera to it via the near-universal USB-C. And for those looking for the utmost in portability, there’s good news: Apple just updated the iPad Mini, adding the A17 Pro processor from the iPhone 15 Pro and making it compatible with the Apple Pencil Pro, which has haptic feedback and squeeze control.

From a technical perspective, the Mini is less capable than the latest iPad Air, which packs an M2 chip, which is itself slower than the M4 powering iPad Pro. The latter also has a much better screen than the Mini; the Pro’s 120Hz 'tandem OLED' display can reach brightnesses of up to 1,600 nits when viewing or editing HDR content, while the Mini’s 60Hz LCD screen caps out at 500 nits.

None of that is to say that the Mini isn’t capable, just that there are trade-offs to its smaller size and lower price – the A17 Pro is still a plenty-powerful chip for most editing tasks.* But if portability is your number one priority, it’s hard to beat the iPad Mini.

* All the image editing for this article was done using Photoshop on an iPad with a much older A14 chip.

$499 at Amazon $499 at B&H $499 at Apple A desktop editing tool

We got to try out the MX Creative Console at Adobe Max, and found that it could be very useful in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Photo: Mitchell Clark

If you prefer to do your photo editing on a computer, it may be worth checking out Logitech’s new MX Creative Console accessory. There are two parts to it: a bank of buttons that are actually tiny displays, and a jog wheel surrounded by a scroll wheel and four programmable buttons. On the software side, the console connects to programs like Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, Photoshop and Capture One.

You can fill the bank of buttons with various functions, like selecting certain parameters or tools, which you can then control with the wheel. You can also use the wheel to zoom in or scroll through your library. All of it is customizable, too, and you can have several pages of buttons for each application, which you move through using two arrow keys on the console.

The bank of buttons connects to your computer via USB-C, while the wheel uses Bluetooth. The company says it can run for up to six months off two AA batteries.

App support for the Creative Console is currently relatively limited: it doesn’t natively tie in to the Affinity creative apps, or Apple’s Final Cut Pro. There are ways around that – you can bind keyboard shortcuts to the console’s keys – but the experience won’t be as smooth as it is in the natively-supported Photoshop, Lightroom, or Capture One. Logitech says companies are absolutely welcome to create integrations, but it’s always worth buying hardware for what it can do now rather than what it may be able to do in the future.

$199 at Amazon $199 at B&H Another new digital photo frame Image: Skylight

Earlier this month we covered Lexar's new digital photo frame brand, and this week we're hearing about another new digital photo frame. This one is from the brand Skylight, which has upgraded its Frame display to up the resolution, add swappable face plates, and provide more storage.

The Frame 2 has a 25.4cm (10") 1920 x 1200 anti-glare display with auto-adjusting brightness. It comes with 16GB of storage, which the company says can hold up to 16,000 photos. The Frame's frame is held on by magnets, making it easy to remove if you want to change up how it looks. The company says there's eight colors available across four styles.

The Frame 2 costs $169 with the 'Classic' or 'Cover' frame, or $199 for the variant with the 'Wood' or 'Shadow Box' frame. Of course, you can always swap the frame out later; the Classic and Cover frames are available for $15 each, and the Wood and Shadow Box ones are $30 each.

$169 at Skylight A new action cam cometh

Image: Insta360

Action cams, like drones, are often used as an accessory supplementing a main camera; after all, nobody wants to strap their EOS R7 to the front of a bike or a surfboard. Insta360 is teasing what appears to be a new generation of its flagship Ace Pro action camera, with an announcement set to come on October 22nd.

If you were considering the new GoPro Hero13 Black or DJI Osmo Action 5 Pro, it may be worth waiting until then to see what Insta360 is bringing to the market – the company certainly seems to think it has the leg up, with its marketing tagline of ‘the real pro’ seeming to act as a not-so-subtle dig at both cameras.

Click here to see last week's roundup

Linking your Frame.io project with Lightroom will make images in the project automatically show up in your Lightroom library on desktop, web, and mobile.

Image: Adobe

Frame.io, Adobe's collaborative media management tool, has supported image files for a while, but it's still mostly thought of as something more for videographers than photographers. That's likely thanks to long-standing integration with video editing software like Premiere Pro, Final Cut, and Avid Media Composer. And while some stills cameras have been able to upload directly to it and Capture One has had limited support for it for a while, most photographers probably would've had a hard time fitting it into their workflow.

That may be changing, though. We got to talk with JJ Powel, Product Marketing Manager for Frame.io at Adobe, about the launch of Frame.io 4, and he demoed some features that could make it quite a bit more useful for photographers.

The service is now officially integrated into Lightroom, which makes its Camera To Cloud feature much more useful; if you have a camera that supports Camera To Cloud, you can take pictures and have them automatically sync to Lightroom over Wi-Fi. Some models can even do it when they’re off, meaning you could come home, set your camera down, and have all your photos available the next time you opened Lightroom, assuming they had enough time to sync.

The S5II is one of the new group of cameras that supports Frame.io's Camera To Cloud feature.

Photo: Richard Butler

"That's really important because it unlocks powerful workflows in Lightroom," said Powell. "I can do a Raw default and assign any preset. If I'm uploading Raw and JPEG the JPEG will stay untouched. But the Raw asset, I could say 'import it as black and white or import using one of the adaptive presets or a preset I already set up.'" Of course, like most Lightroom edits, you can always change the profile or any other settings applied on import after the fact.

"Maybe I'm capturing images out of music festival and I've got three cameras going and they're all going to one editor. They can start pushing assets to social really quick. This is the most seamless path from camera to edit," said Powell.

The system is also relatively smart. If your sync gets interrupted and you want to bring in your photos the old-fashioned way via an SD card or a USB cable, Lightroom will recognize which ones it got from the cloud and will skip transferring them over, avoiding duplicates.

Frame.io 4 could also make sharing photos with clients or co-workers easier for those who choose to use it. The new Collections feature will likely be familiar to anyone who does a lot of work in Lightroom Classic; it lets you tell Frame.io to gather up all the photos in a project that meet specified criteria, where they can further be organized and sorted based on their metadata. As an easy example, at the beginning of a contract, you could share a collection to a client that only includes images you’ve rated 5 stars. Then, as you sort through your photos and rate them, the ones you mark with 5 stars will automatically become available to whoever you’ve shared the collection with.

Frame.io's collections feature is similar to Lightroom Classic's Smart Collections, and can easily be shared with others.

Image: Adobe

That's not to say that every photographer should rush out and start using Frame.io. It shines brightest when you're using both the Lightroom integration and Camera to Cloud, and the latter is only available in select cameras. Nikon announced that it's bringing it to the Z6III, Z8, and Z9, and Leica is adding it to the SL3, but those additions still only bring the number of supported stills cameras up to 16. The syncing while off feature also isn’t available on all cameras that support Camera to Cloud.

There's also the matter of cost. Frame.io for Creative Cloud is included with the All Apps subscription, as well as subscriptions to Premiere Pro and After Effects individually. That gives you 100GB of space and support for up to two users and five projects. However, the Photography bundle and standalone Lightroom subscription don't include that benefit. You could use the Frame.io free tier, which supports Camera to Cloud but only gives you 2GB of space to use it with, but if you want to be able to sync more than a handful of Raws, you'll likely have to upgrade to the $15 a month Pro account. That's more than you'll pay for Lightroom, though it does come with an arguably overkill 2TB of space and other features.

But if the stars align for you – you have a camera that supports Camera to Cloud, you use Lightroom, and you mainly shoot JPEG or have Creative Cloud All Apps – it may be worth giving Frame.io a shot, even if you've never considered it before.

Photo: Mitchell Clark

This year we attended Adobe Max in person, where we got to demo several of the new features in Photoshop, Lightroom, and Adobe Camera Raw. If you missed the announcement, you can read our coverage of it here, though we'll be covering the hits here.

We documented the demos on our Instagram, but in case you missed it, we're rounding them up here. We were also able to interview some folks at Adobe while at the show, so stay tuned for more on the future of Photoshop, Lightroom, and other Adobe projects like Content Credentials.

Adobe Camera Raw Adaptive profile

Adobe has added a new profile to Adobe Camera Raw, called Adaptive. It uses AI to analyze what's in the scene, and adjust exposure, tones, saturation, and other parameters automatically, potentially giving you a better starting point for your own edits. It's also designed to work with HDR images and produces both HDR and SDR profiles, making it even more useful for those who aren't used to editing for HDR displays yet.

Since it's substantially more opinionated than other profiles like Adobe Color or Adobe Landscape, there's also an amount slider that lets you tone down or turn up the results.

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Photoshop automatic distraction removal

Perhaps one of the niftiest features Adobe added to Photoshop is the automatic distraction removal tool. It analyzes your photo for cables, wires, or people that may be in the way of your subject, then automatically fills in the areas they took up.

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Lightroom Quick Actions

Lightroom's new Quick Actions, available on Mobile and Web, will automatically mask parts of your image like subjects, backgrounds, and skies, and let you make adjustments to them.

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Lightroom Frame.io integration

Frame.io is now built into Lightroom, letting you access images uploaded to the cloud service. Combine that with Frame.io's Camera To Cloud feature, available on some Fujifilm, Panasonic, Nikon, Canon, and Leica cameras, and you can take pictures on your camera then watch them appear wirelessly in Lightroom.

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Content Credentials

Adobe's Content Credentials system is part of a larger industry-wide initiative to help prove what content on the web is authentic, and to keep track of what edits have been made to it. While at Max, we got to take a look at the Chrome extension meant to surface the credentials attached to images on social media and other sites, as well as the closed beta site that lets you attach content credentials to your own images, and view what credentials are attached to existing images.

We got to sit down with one of the senior directors of the Content Authenticity Initiative at Adobe while at the conference, so expect a more thorough check-in of the technology to come.

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Generative Extend in Premiere Pro

Photoshop has had several generative AI features in beta for a while now, but now Adobe has introduced one for its Premiere video editing software. It lets you extend a clip by up to two seconds, helping you fill in gaps, transitions, or slightly flubbed takes with imagery generated by Adobe's Firefly model.

According to Meagan Keane, Principal Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Pro Video, the idea came from asking customers what some of their biggest editing pain points were. The Pro Video team was then able to take that to the research team, and the result is Generative Extend.

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Updated Oct 17, 2024

By the time you're spending over $2,500, you're looking at getting one of the best cameras around. You should expect it to deliver exceedingly detailed images and capture high-end video, all without having to compromise much on speed for when the action picks up.

For most applications, a camera around $2000 will be more than enough, but if you and your photography need the very highest image quality or some specialist capability, the cameras in this guide are among the best we've yet seen. There are a handful of dedicated sports/photojournalism cameras or luxury models above the $4000 upper limit we've set ourselves, but these are usually such singular offerings that we're assuming you don't need our help in choosing if you're seriously considering them.

At this level, there aren't really any bad picks, so if you have any investment at all in the lens system of one company, this should probably be the deciding factor for you. But we'll highlight the particular strengths we found in each camera, just in case you are planning to switch systems.

Our recommendations:

• Best high-end camera: Canon EOS R5 II
• Another great option: Nikon Z8
• The compact option: Sony a7CR
• High-spec high res: Sony a7R V
• IQ above all else: Fujifilm GFX 50S II
• Best for video: Sony FX3

Best high-end camera: Canon EOS R5 II

45MP Stacked CMOS sensor | Eye-controlled AF subject selection | Up to 30fps continuous shooting

The EOS R5 II is one of the most all-around capable cameras we've tested.

Photo: Richard Butler

Buy now:

$5399 at Amazon.com$4299 at B&H Photo$4299 at Adorama What we like:

• Excellent image quality in a range of circumstances
• Very fast autofocus with great subject tracking
• Good video support tools, including waveform display

What we don't:

• Slight reduction in dynamic range in extreme scenarios
• Eye control can be tempermental
• Temperature limits require considered shooting in heaviest video modes

Canon's EOS R5 II is the company's latest high-end, full-frame mirrorless camera, built around a 45MP Stacked CMOS sensor. The grip is very well-shaped and proportioned, and the controls are all well-placed and comfortable to use for extended periods. Eye Control for autofocus is excellent when it works, which isn't always The EOS R5 II does a vast range of things and does most of them extremely well: it's a really impressive all-rounder for action, landscapes, video, you name it. The EOS R5 II has excellent tracking and subject-tracking autofocus performance. The subject detection is effective without getting in your way. It can shoot Raws at up to an extremely rapid 30fps. The 45MP Raws are highly detailed, and the JPEG sharpening and noise reduction are sensible. It can't quite match higher-resolution cameras like the A7R V, but performs well in its own right. It has plenty of video options up to Raw 8K/60p, offering high levels of detail, though it can overheat when shooting in its most impressive modes. Its rolling shutter rates are generally quite good. The EOS R5 II excels at almost everything it tries to do, and that's a long list. It's hard to imagine what photo or video need it won't support you in.

Read our EOS R5 II Review

See the EOS R5 II Studio Scene

Sample galleryThis widget is not optimized for RSS feed readers. Please open this article's permalink in a browser to view this content. Should I still buy the EOS R5?

Short answer: yes. It lacks some of the newer camera's features like eye-controlled subject selection, action priority modes and AI noise reduction, but if those don't matter to you – or aren't worth the $400 MSRP premium of the EOS R5 II – the EOS R5 is still plenty capable in 2024.

Buy now:

Buy at AdoramaBuy at B&H PhotoBuy w/ 24-105mm f/4 at Amazon.com Another great option: Nikon Z8

46MP Stacked CMOS sensor | 20fps Raw, 30fps full-size JPEG shooting | 8K/60 and 4K/120 video

The Nikon Z8 delivers just about everything: speed, AF, video and, most importantly of all, image quality.

Photo: Richard Butler

Buy now:

Buy at Amazon.comBuy at B&H PhotoBuy at Adorama What we like:

• Superb autofocus
• Fast shooting
• Excellent video

What we don't:

• Large, heavy body
• Relatively low-res (though fast) viewfinder
• Not all subject detection modes equally good

The Nikon Z8 is a fast-shooting stills and video-capable mirrorless camera with a 46MP Stacked CMOS sensor. It's an extremely strong competitor compared to the EOS R5 II, but Canon's action sports settings and eye control push it over the edge.

If those things don’t matter much to you, you can pretty much base your decision on whether you prefer Nikon or Canon’s lens lineup. They’re broadly similar, and both brands tightly control which options third-party manufacturers can offer. Still, there are some key differences, like how Nikon’s Z mount 70-200mm F2.8 can be used with a teleconverter while Canon's RF-mount version can’t.

The Z8 has a large, comfortable grip with well-placed controls. There's a good level of customizable controls and ergonomics that match the pro-focused Z9. The viewfinder resolution is low but the brightness and lack of lag make it one of best-suited to action. Video quality is excellent with a choice of Raw and 10-bit gamma/compressed formats with up to 8K/60 or 4K/60 derived from it. There's also a less-detailed 4K/120p option. Tools such as waveforms and dependable AF make it easy to shoot with. The Nikon Z8 is a hugely capable all-rounder, combining resolution, autofocus performance and video capabilities not seen before at this price. It's not a small or light camera but it makes you feel ready for anything, photographically while you're carrying it.

Read our Nikon Z8 review

See the Nikon Z8 studio scene

Sample galleryThis widget is not optimized for RSS feed readers. Please open this article's permalink in a browser to view this content. The compact option: Sony a7CR

61MP BSI CMOS sensor | 4K/60p video with 10-bit color | Dedicated ‘AI’ processor for AF system

You can't do much to shrink the lenses, but the a7CR is both the smallest and least expensive camera here.

Photo: Richard Butler

Buy now:

$2998 at B&H Photo $2998 at Adorama $2998 at Amazon What we like:

• Big camera features in a small body
• Outstanding AF performance
• Auto Framing video mode

What we don't:

• Small, low-res viewfinder
• No joystick control
• No fully mechanical shutter

The Sony a7CR is a compact, full-frame camera with a 61MP BSI CMOS sensor. Despite its small size, it packs in most of the features found in Sony’s larger bodies while still delivering stunning detail, without sacrificing much performance.

The a7CR is impressively small for a full-frame camera. The addition of a front control dial improves handling significantly. Notably, there’s no joystick for positioning the AF point, and the viewfinder is small and very low resolution for a camera costing this much. "If you're looking for maximum resolution in a travel-sized body, the a7RC is tough to beat." The a7CR's 61MP sensor can capture a lot of detail, putting it ahead of most full-frame rivals; though it is a little noisier in low light. JPEG colors are pleasing, and excellent sharpening makes the most out of the 61MP sensor. Raw files provide plenty of latitude to pull up shadows at base ISO. The a7CR delivers impressive results for its size. It essentially provides the same level of image quality, and most of the same features, as Sony's a7R V, but in a smaller package. In exchange for the small size, you make a few compromises, like no AF joystick, but if you're looking for maximum resolution in a travel-sized body, the a7CR is tough to beat.

Read our Sony a7CR initial review

Sample galleryThis widget is not optimized for RSS feed readers. Please open this article's permalink in a browser to view this content. High-spec high res: Sony a7R V

61MP BSI CMOS sensor | 8K/30p video | Subject recognition AF

Photo: Richard Butler

Buy now:

$3898 at B&H Photo $3898 at Adorama $3898 at Amazon What we like:

• Very detailed Raw files with excellent dynamic range
• Tilt/articulating display suits both photo and video
• Very reliable autofocus, especially for human subjects

What we don't:

• Pixel shift high res and focus stacking require desktop s/w
• Severe rolling shutter for e-shutter and many video modes

The Sony a7R V is the company's fifth-generation high-res full-frame mirrorless camera, built around a stabilized 61MP sensor.

The Sony a7R V is focused more on high resolution than the combination of resolution and speed that the Nikon Z8 and EOS R5 II offer. It can shoot 8K video but only with a major crop and significant rolling shutter.

The a7R V is an excellent tool for capturing high-resolution images. The a7R V is an excellent tool for capturing high-resolution images with a mechanical shutter. The impressive autofocus performance means it is suitable for capturing a wide variety of subjects, including sports and wildlife. However, the sensor's slow readout limits its capabilities if your work requires video capture or the use of a silent electronic shutter.

As a high-resolution studio or landscape camera, the a7R V is very, very good, but the existence of the a7CR, which offers much of the same capability in a smaller, less expensive body, is its biggest threat. It offers a much nicer viewfinder, faster USB connector for tethering, and better Wi-Fi than the a7CR, but except in the case of shooting wide apertures and fast shutter speeds together, there's no difference in image quality.

Read our Sony a7RV review

See the Sony a7RV studio scene

Sample galleryThis widget is not optimized for RSS feed readers. Please open this article's permalink in a browser to view this content. Should I still buy a Sony a7R IV?

The Sony a7R IV offers essentially the same image quality as the newer Mark V, and costs less, so it's still worth taking seriously. It's a less capable video camera, not so much because of the lack of 8K capture – which isn't the Mark V's best feature, by any means - but due to the lack of 10-bit recording, which gives the V's footage more editing flexibility.

For stills shooters, the older camera doesn't have the more sophisticated subject recognition AF of the Mark V, nor options such as focus bracketing, motion correction to make the high-res mode more useful, or the latest 2x2 MIMO Wi-Fi and 10Gbps USB port of the V.

IQ above all else: Fujifilm GFX 50S II

51MP CMOS sensor | In-body stabilization system (up to 6.5EV) | Full HD video at up to 30p

Photo: Richard Butler

Buy now:

$3199 at B&H Photo $3199 at Adorama $3199 at Amazon What we like:

• The most affordable medium-format ILC yet
• Photographer-friendly ergonomics, with lots of customization
• Effective in-body stabilization

What we don't:

• Contrast-detect AF is slower than its peers
• Image quality not signficantly better than the best full-frame
• Eye-detection AF isn't as dependable as rival systems
• Unimpressive video specifications (HD only)

The Fujifilm GFX 50S II is a (relatively) compact 50MP medium format mirrorless interchangeable lens camera with built-in image stabilization.

Fujifilm's most affordable medium format camera is a highly attractive option for enthusiasts and professionals alike. The 50S II is the least expensive digital medium format camera ever launched. Image stabilization and precise focus extend its usability far beyond the studio. Speed, autofocus and video aren't its greatest strengths, but it should have major appeal for enthusiast photographers wanting some of the best image quality available.

The GFX 50S II is perhaps the most specialized here: it's not especially fast or versatile but in terms of image quality, it has a slight edge over the best of its full-frame rivals (some of which comes from its lenses - the GF primes often being particularly good). The more expensive 100MP versions offer a more significant IQ advantage, but for landscape and studio work, the 50S II is still very good.

Read our Fujifilm GFX 50S II review

See the Fujifilm GFX 50S II studio scene

Sample galleryThis widget is not optimized for RSS feed readers. Please open this article's permalink in a browser to view this content. Best for video: Sony FX3

12MP full-frame BSI CMOS sensor | Full-width 4K/60p, 120p w/ slight crop | 10-bit 4:2:2 capture

Buy now:

$3898 at B&H Photo $3898 at Adorama $3899 at Amazon What we like:

• Excellent video quality
• XLR top-handle included
• Fan for extended recording

What we don't:

• No DCI video options
• No viewfinder for stills shooters
• No shutter angle option

The Sony FX3 is part of Sony's Cinema line of cameras, but we've included it here because it shares so much in common with the a7S III, but is a better choice, we feel.

The Sony FX3 is an image-stabilized, fan-cooled full-frame video camera designed to shoot UHD 4K footage at up to 120p.

It loses out on a viewfinder, compared to the a7S III, but gains dependability and extended recording times thanks to the addition of a cooling fan. It appears to cost a little more on paper but the FX3 comes with a top handle with built-in XLR adapters, which is an expensive add-on to the a7S III. Sony has also added some video-centric features, such as EI exposure to the FX3 that haven't then appeared on its more stills-focused cameras.

You may also consider the EOS R5C, which is essentially a video-focused version of the original EOS R5. Compared to the FX3, it gains a fan but omits an image stabilization mechanism, though we prefer the more compact form-factor of the Sony, anyway, especially if you plan to shoot on a gimbal.

Why you should trust us

This buying guide is based on cameras used and tested by DPReview's editorial team. We don't select a camera until we've used it enough to be confident in recommending it, usually after our extensive review process. The selections are purely a reflection of which cameras we believe to be best: there are no financial incentives for us to select one model or brand over another.