Companies find it difficult to keep new products secret – or they pretend to find it difficult, which is leak marketing. This also applies to the new mirrorless bodies EOS R8 for full format and R50 with APS-C, they were even known by their real names for months. Both are the entry-level models in their respective classes. In the current market situation, that costs 1,800 or 830 euros. If you just wanted a compact mirrorless, you paid only 610 euros for the predecessor of the R50, the M50 II, not even two years ago.
Farewell to the M bayonet
But there is now also the RF bayonet for the small mirrorless from Canon, even if you want to switch to the professional camp later, the lenses still fit. And thanks to the high resolutions of modern cameras, even good APS-C optics can deliver good results on full format with Crop. Canon’s M bayonet has now become exotic, but you don’t need to hope for a cheap second-hand market any time soon: if you have good glass, you won’t be giving it away any time soon, because it’s foreseeable that nothing will follow.
However, there are plenty of lenses for mirrorless systems, whereby the quite idiosyncratic marketing of Japanese companies was once again evident. Nikon just five weeks ago showed the Nikkor Z 85mm f/1.2 S and Z 26mm f/2.8 at CES with “Coming Soon”, revealed no prices, and now they have also been fully presented. That’s hype marketing, but such products don’t need it. The 85 is a typical portrait lens for professionals, who then earn the required 2,800 euros again.
Expensive Nikkor even more expensive
The price is bold, it has to be called the small 26 millimeter pancake, because 500 euros is far too much for the simple structure. Of course, this is also weatherproof, looks a little retro, and is ideal for street photography – only there are at least comparable optics from other manufacturers for half the price. According to Nikon, with a depth of 24 millimeters it should be the flattest full-frame autofocus ever, only: being bright and not getting stuck in your jacket pocket is the requirement on the street, not any records.
And the less common focal length of 26 millimeters, albeit useful, fuels a suspicion that has been voiced again and again behind closed doors with the spread of mirrorless bayonets: Nikon, like other manufacturers, is supposed to actively hinder third-party lens manufacturers. And recently there was Nikonrumors a little more accurate. So it should only be “allowed” to bring optics onto the market with focal lengths other than those already available through Nikon’s own lenses.
License only for oblique focal lengths?
This should only apply to autofocus lenses, for which a license is then required from Nikon, the rumor site continues. Why this is necessary is not described in detail. The assumption is that it is about the software protocol of the contacts of the Z-mount, but there has not been a public statement from Nikon about it so far. If all of this is true, it would explain why many lenses from companies like Tamron and Sigma that already exist for other systems are not available for the Z-mount, and why some new devices with unusual focal lengths are appearing. Purely on paper, Tamron’s 28-75 mm, for example, is something different than the standard 24-70 mm Nikkor. Whereby a bit of wide-angle is missing again, but, hey, then we’ll buy the 500-euro pancake right away. Marketing can be that simple if you think the customers won’t see through it.
At least in purely financial terms, Nikon’s strategy has worked so far, because the company was able to in the third quarter In its current 2023 financial year, sales will increase by 34.4 percent and profit before taxes by 11.4 percent. It is significant that the company only names the entry-level and the top as the “most important products” in its presentation, namely the Z 30 and Z 9. The latter, in price and handling intended for professionals with 6,000 euros on the bank, is said to be sustainable selling heavily, which is unsurprising given the camera’s capabilities. In the middle class, for example an affordable full-frame camera, Nikon should soon follow suit. Maybe the certainly improbable lavish money from the lens licenses will be enough at some point. Irony? Yes.
Fair offers
The smaller providers who make fair offers to customers in their niches have to pay more attention to the price. This week, for example, version 6.3 of DxO Photolab was released just three months after the main version 6.0 – as a free update. Among other things, a function for simulating printer inks and paper on the screen was retrofitted. And for Mico-Four-Thirds, OM Systems released a tele-macro with a focal length of 90 millimeters and image stabilizer, for which 1,500 euros is not too much to ask.
Good and bad picture archives
The first part of the Stern magazine’s photo archive can also be viewed free of charge and can be licensed for commercial use. There are now 250,000 press photos, by 2025 it should be three million. The Bavarian State Library took it over properly from Stern, which today is more of an exception. We are of course talking about “Generative AI”, i.e. the creation of new images through machine learning. And after a lot of quarrels, the air for Stability AI, the company behind the generator Stable Diffusion, gets really thin: Anyone who brings the big agency Getty Images to a lawsuit in the USA should have good arguments. This is not about AI per se, because according to Getty there are licenses for it. Stability AI is said not to have asked them in the first place.
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