Shigeki Ishizuka was former Vice Chairman of Sony Imaging. He wrote a book that is now listed at Amazon Japan were he shares allee the insights about the Sony camera business. He has been interviewed by Nikkei and in my video I share what he said!

With a $50 discount you can now get the new updated Topaz Video AI (click here). This is how it works:

And this is the full list of improvements:

You can now preorder the new Viltrox 16mm f/1.8 FE lens at PerGear. Preorders should be available very soon on Amazon too.

On May 22 Zhongyi will announce those new lenses:

Zhongyi Optical 20mm F0.95 APS-C:

• 13 lenses in 8 groups, 1 piece of ultra-low dispersion glass, 4 pieces of ultra-high refractive index Glass, 1 piece of aspherical glass,
• 9 aperture blades
• closest focusing distance is 30cm
• size is 76*93mm
• filter size is 72mm
• weight is about 600g
• Sony E, Canon R, Nikon Z, Fuji FX.
• The price is 2680 yuan (nearly $400)
• Listed at 20:00 on May 22, 2023.

Firefly series 20mm/35mm/50mm T1.0 APS-C cine lenses:

• ultra-long focus travel is 270°
• aperture travel is 60°, which is almost “zero breathing”.
• The weight is 730g/640g/820g respectively.
• Sony E, Canon R, Nikon Z, Fuji FX.
• The price of 20mm T1.0 is 3580 yuan The price of 35mm T1.0 is 3180 yuan The price of 50mm T1.0 is 3380 yuan The 20/35/50mm T1.0 set is priced at 8880 Yuan (each lens about $450)
  
• will be available at 20:00 on May 22, 2023. 

Just sharing a curiosity about this Street Photographers image I generated with AI. It’s just to show that:

1. AI can create images that look like photos
2. That you can create images you could never take in real world

Peak Design completely reinvented the hand strap and announced the Micro Clutch on Kickstarter (click here). This is what they write:

Micro Clutch is a hand strap. It’s optimized for mirrorless cameras. We made Micro Clutch for two reasons: 

• Cameras have, for the most part, gotten smaller. 
• Hands have, for the most part, remained the same stupid size.

These facts cannot exist peacefully with one another without some sort of tool to bridge their contradictory nature. This is where we come in.

Micro Clutch provides security, stability, and comfort in a delightfully well-designed little package.

A couple of days ago I posted a totally wild rumor about a possible “paid firmware” update for the A7sIII. As I wrote in the article this was not coming from a trusted source and very likely to be fake. The only reason I decided to post it anyway was to kickstart a discussion about how Sony could fix their firmware updates strategy.

Well trusted sources confirmed the info I got is WRONG. There will be no paid A7sIII firmware update. There will be the “usual” Sony firmware upgrades with bug fixes. Although there is an internal discussion about adding new features on currently available cameras. Hopefully this will end with some good news for all of us :)

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One more personal note: Some people still seem to be very annoyed when I post totally wild rumors. But I want to remind you that I always separate rumors between those from TRUSTED sources and those from ANONYMOUS first time sources. I asked you readers many times in the past if it would be ok for you to post also those highly unlikely unverified rumors. The answer was clearly YES.