Sony Tidbits…


Sony Compact Prime Lenses: Perfect for Sony A7CII and Sony A7CR

Today deals at Amazon, BHphoto, Adorama, Amazon DE, Amazon UK, Amazon FR, Amazon IT, FotoErhardt DE, FotoKoch DE.
Top-Rated Cameras for Portrait and Fashion Photography (Explora).
Adorama’s Favorite Holiday Photo Gifts of 2023 (42West).
New generation snap shooter α7CⅡ (Mapcamera).
Sony FE 28-60mm f/4-5.6 lens review (Christopher Frost)
What do you do if you find your stolen items for sale on Ebay? I get the chance to find out (Mike Lane).
Best fast zoom for Sony APS-C cameras? Detailed tests on Sony 16-55 f2.8 vs Tamron 17-70 f2.8 (Lightpoint).

Follow our new Youtube channel.
Join our SonyAlphaForum.
I kindly invite you all to follow our Discord channel, Instagram, Facebook, Threads and Twitter to not miss news and rumors

We have our own Facebook camera groups you can join to discuss the upcoming new cameras in detail:
Sony Alpha group. Sony A1 group. Sony A9 series group. Sony A7r series group. Sony A7s series group. Sony A7 series group.

Sony A9III officially shipping out today from US stores

A couple of readers told me that their reorder shipped out today from BHphoto. Amazon. Adorama.

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Thanks BS8 for the screenshot!

Reminder: Sony dropped the price of their TOUGH CFexpress Type A cards series sold by Amazon (Click here) and BHphoto.

Topaz Photo AI v2.3.0 released…and a new teaser for the next launch

There is a new v2.3.0 update for Topaz Photo Ai (get it here). At the same time Topaz CEO Eric Young launched a teaser for the upcoming new version:

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Hi, and thanks so much for trusting our products with your work over the past few years.

In 2024, our photo and video products will experience the most significant evolution since our first AI product six years ago. I wanted to share what you can expect out of our products in the next few years.

We believe that generative AI should improve your work rather than replace it, so our product development philosophy focuses on three principles:

  1. Enhancement vs replacement: for improving your work without altering its core essence.
  2. Natural and photorealistic results, vs fantastical: for your photos and videos where preserving reality matters.
  3. On-device processing, vs cloud: for a faster workflow, more editing options, and private processing.

We think that these principles are essential for professional use cases, but currently undervalued in AI research. As such, we’re accelerating this direction with our three core products:

Photo AI
Photo AI is designed for photographers, and solves many photo quality problems like noise reduction and sharpening better than anything else. In 2024, we will use generative AI to greatly improve the quality and experience of other photo editing tasks.

Video AI
Video AI delivers you sharp, steady, and smooth footage without motion artifacts. In 2024, you will see improved AI model quality, a better app experience, and more integrations for professional editing workflows.

Gigapixel
Built for everyone, Gigapixel 7 brings improved upscaling model quality and better usability. Later this year, we’ll release fundamental improvements to our upscaling models that unlock another level of quality, better than anything else you’ve seen yet. Afterwards, we will bring Gigapixel to more platforms than just desktop.

We’re incredibly excited about this direction, and you’ll soon see some of these improvements in the next few months.

We’d also love your feedback as we’re filling our roadmap for the rest of the year. What would you love to be able to do with your images and videos that you can’t currently? Is there anything you wish our current products would do better? We will read and consider every comment.

Thank you again for trusting our products, and we will do everything possible to continue earning that trust!

Thanks,
Eric Yang
CEO, Topaz Labs

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 v2.3.0 Press release:

This week we have several new additions to the app and updates to existing tools as well. There are 2 new upscaling models – Standard v2 and High Fidelity v2, as well as update to the Remove model for Windows machines. Please see the notes below for more information about these models. Additionally, the Object Selection Brush is now available for use in the Remove tool. Finally, the Adobe Lightroom Classic plug-in will now add images back to their original Collections once exporting is done.

Standard v2 and High Fidelity v2:

  • For Standard we’ve improved the deblur consistency (blurry patch issue)
  • For High Fidelity we’ve improved the grain preserving consistency for low denoise/remove jpeg sliders
    • For use cases requiring keeping original noise/grain, select this model and tune down the two sliders.
  • For High Fidelity we’ve fixed the tile blending artifacts
  • For both models we’ve fixed the tile artifacts on Apple Silicon Mac’s Neural Engine
    • There is an option to turn off Neural Engine but it will slow down processing
  • For quality in general, the models should be more generative

Remove Model:

  1. Improved the speed of the tool via steps distillation
  2. Solved some quality issues via larger data augmentation

Note: If you are experiencing issues with the Remove tool on macOS Sonoma a potential fix is updating to the latest version of Sonoma

Buckle up US readers: Sony A9III will be shipped to you aftertomorrow

Get ready for the unboxing party: The Sony A9III will start to ship out in less than 40hours from BHphoto. Amazon. Adorama. I have been told US stores already have a large pile of Sony A9III boxes. But they can only ship them starting from Feb 8.

BHphoto also organized a celebration event for this :)

Reminder: Sony dropped the price of their TOUGH CFexpress Type A cards series sold by Amazon (Click here) and BHphoto.

 

Message to Source

Message to the Source that just sent me a message:

I know you said you can’t answer anything. But without to mention a camera name…still no news on new Full Frame Alpha camera launch period? Still weird I did not get anything…

P.S.: I got the Sony announcement date(will publish it soon!) and I also knew about this WOW product which I really do like a lot! ;)

To readers: Ignore this message ;)