Ther German company released the new Excire Foto 2024 update (Click here to get it).

Press text:

Excire Foto 2024 Update Adds Timesaving Features and Improved Search Functionality
PRC’s Revolutionary Photo-Organizing Software Receives Major Enhancements in Free April 2024 Update

Lübeck, Germany – April 23rd, 2024 – PRC, the AI company behind the award-winning Excire software, has today unveiled a major update to its flagship program, Excire Foto 2024.
Known for its futuristic image-management tools – including a prompt-search AI that allows users to instantly retrieve images by inputting text descriptions and an X-tetics AI that intelligently rates each image based on its aesthetic qualities – Excire Foto 2024 has propelled photographers into a new era of image organization. Now, thanks to enhancements included in the April 2024 update, Excire makes it easier than ever to find, cull, and catalog images so photographers can spend less time behind the computer and more time on their craft.

Improvements to Excire Foto 2024 include:

• New filters to sort and locate images more effectively (including an option to identify files that have not yet been analyzed by the program)
• Refinements to the Find by Keyword search selectors; users can now apply OR and NOT operations for increased precision when searching
• Extension of the text-search feature to selectable metadata so users can locate images from the file path, file description, file headline, and more
• Additional keywording features, including the option to select, copy, and paste a subset of keywords; drag-and-drop functionality when assigning keywords to photos; and automatic copying of keywords to the clipboard when performing keyword copy-paste operations
• Significant enhancements for a more streamlined duplicate-search workflow, including a duplicate statistics dialog with intuitive flagging functionality; the option to exclude photo sequences from the AI-powered Find Duplicates search; and the option to select the first photo of each duplicate-search-result cluster to save time when cleaning up folders

Smaller upgrades include:

• The option to change the loading behavior for lens model metadata
• An “Invert selection” menu option
• Keyword tree multiselection
• A “Manage profiles” option in the “Renaming Profiles” dialog
• Minor bug fixes, design changes, and improvements

Importantly, the update resets the 14-day trial period. Photographers who previously tested – but did not purchase – Excire Foto 2024 can once again download a 14-day trial of the program and evaluate the software’s updated features.
For customers who already own a copy of Excire Foto 2024, the April 2024 update is complimentary. Users will be prompted to download the update package upon launching Excire Foto 2024. It is recommended that users make a catalog backup before installing the new software.

Tamron Q1 financial report has been published. The operating Income increased significantly by approximately 1.7 times YoY with Significant record-high profits for the 1st quarter. Tamron writes:

Interchangeable lenses market showed double-digit growth on both volume and value basis, reflecting the strong performance of the camera market.

Those are their sales based on the region:

• Japan…2.07 billion yen (1.434 billion yen in Q1 2023)
• North America… 1,307 million yen (1,412 million yen)
• Europe… 1,299 million yen (1,417 million yen)
• Asia…8,836 million yen (4,977 million yen)
• Others…430 million yen (373 million yen)

As you can see it’s Asia and Japan that are driving the sales. Europe and North America actually had a decline in sales.

And the forecast looks great too:

Both in Own-Brand products and OEM products, double-digit upward revision of Original Forecast to double-digit sales growth. Despite of increase in materials costs due to higher raw material costs, planned to achieve double-digit Operating Income growth with high profitability.

Tamron also stated that a total of 7 lenses will be launched in 2024. Two of them have been already announced:

• 28-75mm Z-mount
• 11-20mm RF-mount

I guess some of the remaining 5 lenses will be new Z/X/RF mount versions of current E-mount lenses. But hopefully they will also launch some exciting new E-mount lenses they patented in the past years:

24-110mm f/4.0
25-50mm f/2.0
28-100mm f/2.8
28-120mm f/4.0
28mm f/1.4
30mm f/1.4
35mm f/1.4
40mm f/1.4
50mm f/1.4
75mm f/1.4
60mm f/2.0 macro
70-130mm f/2.0
90mm f/2.8 macro
135mm f/1.8
150mm f/2.8 macro
180mm f/3.5 macro
350mm f/4.5
200-400mm f/4.0
200-800mm f/5.6
13mm f/1.8 (APS-C)
18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 (APS-C)
18-500mm f/3.5-6.5 (APS-C)

Fingers crossed 1-2 of those designs will be coming in 2024!

The Chinese E-commerce platform JD.com released its report on brand sales in the camera and lens category in the past year:

UPDATE: The grey subtitle on the top left says “unit: million yuan”. So if we take Sony as an example, it means Sony sold 4269 million yuan, which is roughly 590 million USD.

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Found via Weibo (Thanks to the messenger for the translation!)