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Fujifilm users can now send film simulations to their camera from their iPhone

Two apps make it easier to manage individual recipes, or even sets of them, from your phone

A Fujifilm X-H2 with a phone leaning against it, running the Fuji X Weekly app.Mitchell Clark

Experimenting with “recipes” that build on Fujifilm’s “Film Simulations” to change the look of your JPEGs – subtly or not so much – has long been a tradition among a certain set of the company’s users. However, actually getting the recipes to your camera has historically been a bit of a pain, requiring you to manually adjust several parameters and save them to a custom profile that you can later recall. Recent cameras from Fujifilm have somewhat improved the experience with a dedicated recipe system, but it’s still a lot of manual data entry.

This month, though, two apps have promised to solve that problem. One from a major player in the Fujifilm recipes field, the other from a scrappy upstart. For both, recipe syncing is only available for iOS devices (there currently isn’t even an Android version of the latter), but are signs of exciting things to come.

Fuji X Weekly

Series of screenshots showing the flow of transferring a recipe to a camera using the Fuji X Weekly app.Mitchell Clark

The first is the Fuji X Weekly app, which is an extension of the popular website that hosts many community created recipes. The app has been around for a while, letting you browse and save recipes that you’d then have to manually enter in on your camera. Now, though, it’s able to download recipes, and then sync them to your camera via a standard called Picture Transfer Protocol. You can do this using the hundreds of recipes in the site’s repository, or with custom ones you’ve entered yourself. 

The process is relatively simple, as it is for the rest of the apps we’ll cover today. You put your camera in USB Raw Conv. / Backup Restore mode, then connect it to your phone with a USB cable. From there, the app should be able to send your selected recipe to whichever custom slot you choose, though the first time you go through this process, you may need to give the app system-level permission to talk to an attached camera. Then, you can select the custom setting mode from your camera (which, in my testing, helpfully already had the name of the recipe in the name field) and start shooting.

Screen grab showing several Custom Settings slots on a Fujifilm camera filled with Film Simulations.
Recipes synced from the app are saved as custom settings, letting you easily switch between them.
Mitchell Clark

While the app is free to use, there is a $20/year subscription that unlocks a few extra features. That list now includes the ability to sync sets of recipes to your camera, rather than having to do them one at a time. Say, for example, you have five recipes you use around town every day, and six that you like to have access to while traveling. Paid members could switch between the two with a press of a button.

FujiShare

Two screenshots showing the FujiShare interface.Mitchell Clark

A newcomer to the scene is an app called FujiShare, which Reddit user Rude_Shoulder_2895 posted about on the FujifilmX subreddit. They said they built the app to make it easier to load sets of recipes to their X100V. It also aims to give you more information about the example photos used for a recipe, to make it easier to distinguish how much of the aesthetic is down to the camera settings, the recipe and the scene. The app also has tools built in to let you load a JPEG from a Fujifilm camera and save the recipe that was used to make it, and to apply frame effects to your photo, making it look like it’s matted or on a film reel.

FujiShare is a sleek app with a modern UI, and it’s undeniably nice to scroll through the recipes on offer, though there seem to be far fewer than on Fuji X Weekly. Otherwise, the actual process of syncing your recipes is much the same as it is using the other app, though users can post packs of recipes as well, letting you just save an entire set of recipes at once, before sending it off to your camera. On that note, FujiShare’s ability to send over multiple recipes at once currently isn’t pay-gated.

Screenshots of the FujiShare app, showing the process of transferring a pack of recipes to the camera.
You can use FujiShare to create “packs” of recipes (or find existing ones in the feed), and transfer them to your camera in a single step.
Mitchell

The FujiShare app is currently in public beta, and being distributed through Apple’s TestFlight system, which will take a bit of setup if you haven’t used it before. The beta is free, but it’s unclear what, if any, monetization scheme the app will use when it launches.

Is this new?

Screenshots of the FujiStyle app running on Android, with the option of sending a recipe to the camera.Mitchell Clark

One thing worth noting about these apps is that they don’t appear to be the first to come up with the idea. About a year ago, the team behind the FujiStyle app announced a very similar feature, letting you sync recipes to your camera’s custom settings slots via USB. It works very similarly to the other apps and, perhaps most excitingly, I’ve confirmed it works with Android. (I did, however, have to dive into the phone’s developer settings to get it working; your mileage will vary depending on what version of the OS you have.) Unlike the other apps, it doesn’t appear to support syncing sets of recipes at a time, but I bet I could sync seven recipes using the app faster than I could input one on the camera manually.

The caveats

Since these apps all seem to use a similar system to sync recipes, they share a lot of the same warnings and asterisks. The biggest one is made explicit by Fuji X Weekly. In the blog post announcing the feature, Ritchie Roesch says: “While there’s not a lot that can go wrong with PTP, there is a minor chance of adverse affects, especially if not handled carefully by the developers.” While Roesch says they tested many ways that things could go wrong, and built several safeguards into the app, there is still a risk. 

“Very importantly, connecting your camera to any unofficial, unlicensed, unsupported program may void your camera’s manufacturer warranty,” Roesch says. “Fujifilm confirmed this with me. I tried very hard to obtain a license from Fujifilm so that it wouldn’t risk voiding your warranty, but ultimately that didn’t work out.”

These apps aren’t universally compatible

The app also makes this clear when you first go to use the feature, making it clear that you’re doing so at your own risk. While the other apps don’t make the warning as explicit, they come with similar warnings, so it’s probably a good idea to approach all of them with a sense of caution.

It’s also worth noting that these apps aren’t universally compatible. They should work with cameras newer than the X-T3 and X-T30, but those cameras and anything older don’t support the system that these apps use to transfer recipes. Likewise, if you have an older iPhone with a Lightning port, it may not be as simple as using a Lightning-to-USB-C cable; Fuji X Weekly reports those won’t work, but that adapters may. 

Finally, there’s the fact that the recipe-transfer feature is only available on iOS for Fuji X Weekly, and the FujiShare app currently only exists for iOS. Both developers have said they’re working on version for Android, but the timetables are to be determined. That’s unfortunate for Android users in the short term, as it means they have fewer options. Hopefully that situation will improve soon, but in the meantime, the FujiStyle app is there to serve Android users in the meantime.

Summary

Among the DPReview staff, there were two reactions to the news of these apps. The first was “this is great, why hasn’t Fujifilm built this into its own app yet?” The second was “Please don’t ask them to complicate things, I just want the app to transfer pictures reliably, nothing more.” While that reaction is understandable, I also suspect there’s been some pressure on Fujifilm to integrate this kind of feature into XApp. Recipes are a relatively well-known part of its brand identity, and other companies, like Panasonic and Nikon, have beaten it to the punch, building systems that allow users to download community-created color profiles to their cameras using an app (and Ricoh has made mention of doing something similar, too). 

Perhaps the existence of these third party options could take some of that pressure off, letting Fujifilm focus on reliability and compatibility. Or perhaps it’ll build it into XApp at some point in the future and, to borrow a phrase from the Apple developer community, Sherlock these apps. Either way, at the moment Fujifilm users have options they didn’t before.

About the Author: Mitchell started taking pictures at 10 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s been a wide-ranging adventure, spanning a wide variety of genres and locales, and occasionally dipping into fascinations with video and filmmaking. They honed their technical knowledge doing documentation, programing and QA, writing for The Verge, and just generally messing around on the computer to see what breaks.

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The Google Photos print store just got a Fujifilm upgrade, with new options coming soon

Fujifilm is now running Google Photos’ US print service, expanding the ways you can see your photos in physical form.

Fujifilm and Google Photos logos on a light teal background, divided by a vertical line.Fujifilm / Google

Fujifilm is strengthening its ties with Google, taking a larger part in the company’s photo printing service. The company announced that it’s taking a “leading” role when it comes to operating and supporting the Google Photos Print Store in the US.

This takes the form of a co-branded store built directly into the Google Photos interface. Once you navigate to the Print Store and select a product to order, you’ll be prompted to connect your Google account to Fujifilm’s services*. From there, Fujifilm will take care of payment, printing, shipping and customer support. Fujifilm also says there are “plans to roll out new features, new products and a more robust user experience.” 

You’ve long been able to get printed products directly from the Google Photos app – I personally have a book I made with the service in 2017 – but the company says this expanded partnership will give users “more ways than ever before to print their memories, including an expanded range of print formats, frames, décor, and gift items, going well beyond the offerings of the previous platform.”

There’s a very good chance that, if you bought prints from Google Photos prior to this announcement, Fujifilm or its equipment were involved in some way. The company is a major player when it comes to photo printing for both consumers and industrial clients. Last year, the company identified “growth in the number of images taken and printing needs due to smartphone proliferation” as one of its key opportunities for mid-to-long-term growth.

We always appreciate people having better and easier access to printing their photos

While this announcement seems like it’s probably a bigger deal for Fujifilm and Google, rather than the people actually printing their photos, we always appreciate people having better and easier access to printing their photos. While it used to be a vital part of the process, it’s an easy one to forget nowadays, especially if you’re part of the younger generations who have grown up with purely digital photography. It’ll be exciting to see if this partnership makes printing smartphone photos that bit more attractive to the people who may use it to see their images rendered in ink on paper for the first time.

* While Fujifilm’s press release says the platform “began rolling out to Google Photos users in the U.S. at the end of August 2026,” it seems that’s still in progress. When I tried it on September 1st, I ended up in the old Google Photos payment flow. 

About the Author: Mitchell started taking pictures at 10 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s been a wide-ranging adventure, spanning a wide variety of genres and locales, and occasionally dipping into fascinations with video and filmmaking. They honed their technical knowledge doing documentation, programing and QA, writing for The Verge, and just generally messing around on the computer to see what breaks.

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Xiaomi’s Poco F9 Ultra has megapixels and a mega battery

It’s the first phone in the Poco line that lets you take 200MP images, in certain conditions.

The red Xiaomi Poco F9 Ultra on a color-matched background.Xiaomi

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Xiaomi has announced the Poco F9 Ultra and the F9 Pro, the latest entries in its series of phones that aim to undercut the pricing of traditional flagship models while offering similar specifications. This time around, the company has included a battery with a massive 8050mAh capacity on the Ultra, and a main camera that can shoot images at up to 200MP on both phones.

That main camera is one of three: the phones also include telephoto and ultrawide options. On the Ultra, the former features a “5x” 120mm equiv. F3 optically stabilized lens and a 50MP sensor. Its ultrawide is a slightly-narrower-than-typical 0.7x 17mm equiv. F2.4 lens, also with a 50MP sensor. Xiaomi doesn’t specify the sizes of these sensors, but they seem to be unchanged from the ones found in the Poco F8 Ultra, which used a Type 1/2.76 (20.4mm2) one for its telephoto and Type 1/2.88 (18.6mm2) for its ultrawide, according to GSMArena. The F9 Pro, meanwhile, has a 50MP 2.5x telephoto camera and an 8MP ultrawide option, again seemingly unchanged from its predecessor.

The camera bump of the Xiaomi Poco F9 UltraXiaomi

The main event, though, is the 200MP wide-angle camera shared by the two models. It has a 24mm equiv. F1.7 stabilized lens. By default, it bins all that resolution down to 12.5MP or 50MP, depending on a setting, but you can access its full resolution via a dedicated mode in the camera app. The pictures take a few seconds to process, and won’t have the HDR effect that you get from the phone’s normal modes, but can show much more detail when shot in ideal conditions; the camera reminds you that the mode works best when there’s plenty of light, for reasons that are obvious if you understand how quad bayer sensors work.

Again, Xiaomi hasn’t said what size sensor its main camera uses, beyond claiming that it uses “2μm 16-in-1 Super Pixels.” That figure shouldn’t be taken literally, though, because to fit 200MP worth of 2μm pixels, you’d need the area of a full frame sensor, which it certainly isn’t. It’s more likely that it’s describing the binned quad bayer pixels, which would put the sensor somewhere around a Type 1/1.56 (50mm2). That would also explain why the company hasn’t advertised the size, when it did for the Poco F8 Ultra, which used a larger Type 1/1.31 (72mm2) sensor for its main camera. We’ve reached out to Xiaomi to ask for specifics, and will update this story if we hear back.

Of course, with flagship cameras the sensor specs aren’t everything, as phones make heavy use of computational photography, stacking multiple frames together. You can see our sample gallery shot using the Poco F9 Ultra below.

Beyond the cameras, the Poco F9 phones have relatively high-end specs. The Ultra uses the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip, while the Pro uses the slightly cut-down “V” variant of that system on a chip. Both feature displays capable of going up to 185Hz, and producing 10,000 nits peak brightness, though the latter figure is only over a 1% region of the screen. More realistic is the 4500 nit peak brightness figure, attainable in a window covering 25% of the display. The Ultra’s display is 6.9″, while the Pro’s is 6.59″.

Both phones have relatively large batteries for their size, thanks to the company’s use of silicon-carbon battery chemistry. The Ultra is rated for 8050mAh, while the Pro is 6330mAh. Whichever one you go with, you can recharge it quickly with the correct equipment; they both have 100W wired and 50W wireless charging. What’s more, they can be used to charge other devices that don’t have the same stamina, with 27W of reverse wired charging and 22.5W of reverse wireless charging.

Finally, the phones feature “Sound by Bose” co-branding. On the Ultra, this means stereo speakers combined with a subwoofer that lives alongside the camera modules on the plateau (though the Pro misses out on that feature). Based on the few songs I listened to, it indeed produces pretty impressive bass for a phone. If you go above around 75% volume you’re liable to hear some peaking, but for personal listening that’ll be plenty loud. 

The F9 Ultra comes in “dark cherry” or black, while the Pro is available in black, white or “aurora green,” with the latter literally glowing in the dark after being exposed to light. The Ultra is available with 256GB of storage and 12GB of RAM for $799 / €1,099, or you can upgrade to 16GB of memory with 512GB  or 1TB of storage for $949 / €1199 and $1199 / €1399, respectively. The Pro, meanwhile, starts at €903 for a version of 12GB RAM and 256GB of storage. The launch is global, but, as is typical for Xiaomi phones, excludes the US.

Please do not reproduce any of these images on a website or any newsletter/magazine without prior permission (see our copyright page). We make the originals available for private users to download to their own machines for personal examination or printing; we do so in good faith, so please don’t abuse it. 

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About the Author: Mitchell started taking pictures at 10 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s been a wide-ranging adventure, spanning a wide variety of genres and locales, and occasionally dipping into fascinations with video and filmmaking. They honed their technical knowledge doing documentation, programing and QA, writing for The Verge, and just generally messing around on the computer to see what breaks.

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Sigma is filling out its series of high-end large format cinema lenses, going wider and longer

The company has three new entries in its Aizu Prime series.

A 21mm, 100mm and 125mm cinema lens on a gold background.Sigma

Sigma has announced three new entries to its “Aizu Prime” series of cinema lenses: a 21mm, 100mm and 125mm. Like the rest of the lenses in the series, they’re fast at T1.3, and designed for “large format” cameras, with a 46.3mm image circle that could cover the film in a VistaVision camera or the sensor of an Arri Alexa LF Open Gate. (In photography terms, they’re a touch larger than full frame, which has a 43.3mm diagonal.)

The new lenses take the matched series wider and longer than before. Last year, Sigma launched the Aizu Prime brand with eight lenses, ranging from 25mm to 75mm. It also promised that, eventually, there would be 12 lenses in the series. Today’s announcement brings the total up to 11, with only an 18mm option not yet released.

Several Sigma Aizu Prime lenses sitting on a light table.
The Aizu Prime lenses have all the features a cinematographer would expect: geared control rings with long throws, distance markings (which you can get in either feet or meters) and electronic communication for automatic distortion correction.
Sigma

Sigma says the lens’ optical formulas, like the rest of the Aizu Primes, are “developed exclusively for cinema applications,” with an eye towards being sharp, while still retaining character, and having minimal focus breathing and distortion. Sigma also designed them to match the other lenses in the series, sharing similar color, contrast and flare characteristics, sizes and weights (though the 100mm and 125mm are a touch heavier than the rest at 2.2Kg versus 1.6 or 1.7Kg). That’s an important consideration on a busy film set; you don’t want to have to rebalance your gimbal or reset your follow focus and iris control wheels each time you change a lens.

None of this comes cheap, though, as the three new lenses will cost $9799 each, which is a bit of a jump up from the $8300 the rest of the entries in the series cost. That may be a function of their slightly more exotic focal lengths. They’ll be available for PL or Sony E-mount starting in November.

About the Author: Mitchell started taking pictures at 10 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s been a wide-ranging adventure, spanning a wide variety of genres and locales, and occasionally dipping into fascinations with video and filmmaking. They honed their technical knowledge doing documentation, programing and QA, writing for The Verge, and just generally messing around on the computer to see what breaks.

Want to stay up to date on the latest product news and releases? Add DPReview as a preferred source to ensure our independent journalism makes it to the top of your Google search results.

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Zach Snyder’s new movie is about drugs, violence and photography

It seems cameras will play a staring role in The Last Photograph.

A bedraggled man raises a camera with a flash mounted to his eye intently.Zack Snyder, via TIFF

Zack Snyder has directed movies about a lot of things: superheroes, space, ancient Greeks, owls, you name it. With his next film, it seems like we can add photography to that list.

According to the synopsis, the movie, called The Last Photograph, is about a former DEA agent teaming up with a “washed-up junkie war photographer” to try and find his niece and nephew after their parents were murdered. The trailer (and the title) imply that photography will play some role in the story. There are scenes showing a darkroom, photos being taken at a crime scene, a slow-motion shot of a camera exploding, and several moody frames of someone raising a rangefinder to their eye, presumably witnessing horrors off-screen.

Speaking of: we’ll put the trailer below, but heed the warning in the first few seconds. It’s graphic in pretty much every way it can be, including an exceptional amount of violence. Even if you’re fine with that, it’s probably not something to watch at work.

Of course, being a camera site, we were interested in what cameras the characters were using on-screen, especially since Zack Snyder is a known photography buff (he’s reportedly the cinematographer for the movie, too, as he was on 2021’s Army of the Dead, which he shot almost entirely at F0.95 using rehoused vintage optics*). From what we can tell, the photographer character uses Yashica rangefinder – probably an Electro 35CC from the early 70s, based on the markings – and what looks like a Leica M10 Monochrom, a camera Snyder is demonstrably familiar with.

The Yashica isn’t a stranger to the silver screen, either; Andrew Garfield used one in 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man (back when Spider-Man movies featured the version of Peter Parker who works as a photographer). While the brand wasn’t really known as a go-to for photojournalists, it also wouldn’t be that surprising to hear of a war photographer using a film rangefinder with a fixed 35mm F1.8 lens.

We don’t see a ton of movies about photography, so it’s interesting to be getting a movie from a big-name director that seems to at least feature the art form as an important part of the story. The last film we got like that was Alex Garland’s Civil War, which focused mostly on the role of reporting and war photography (much to people’s surprise, given that it was released during a contentious US election and was set against the backdrop of a fictional second civil war in the country).

Screenshot-2026-08-31-at-09.59.20
What looks to me like a Leica M10 Monochrom (based on the lack of branding) and the Yashica Electro 35CC in a darkroom. Of course, you’d only need to develop film from the later, as the M10 is a digital camera.
Zack Snyder, via TIFF

According to The Hollywood Reporter, it may be a while before we get to see The Last Photograph. It’s set to premiere on September 13 at TIFF (the Toronto International Film Festival), but no one has bought distribution rights to it yet. The film is apparently a passion project for Snyder, who has been kicking the idea around since the mid-2000s. While it certainly seems like it’ll be an intense watch, I’m excited for whenever I do get to see it. In part because of the photography aspect, but also because the cinematography in it looks gorgeous, and it’s always interesting to see a Hollywood director take a big artistic swing.

* The effect is… strange. At times it works and provides a unique aesthetic, at others it borders on distracting. I actually didn’t know about the creative choice when I started watching the movie, but pretty early into it I turned to a friend and said something along the lines of “what is going on with this cinematography?”

About the Author: Mitchell started taking pictures at 10 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s been a wide-ranging adventure, spanning a wide variety of genres and locales, and occasionally dipping into fascinations with video and filmmaking. They honed their technical knowledge doing documentation, programing and QA, writing for The Verge, and just generally messing around on the computer to see what breaks.

Want to stay up to date on the latest product news and releases? Add DPReview as a preferred source to ensure our independent journalism makes it to the top of your Google search results.

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How visiting a car show made me feel better about the future of photography

On being surrounded by people with cameras who aren’t necessarily part of the photography tribe.

A person carrying a camera with a large lens over one shoulder, with another camera strap slung over the other shoulder.Mitchell Clark

Last week, Canon was kind enough to give me the opportunity to attended a Formula Drift event, featuring a high-horsepower competition and a car show with a lot of really interesting vehicles. The shooting experience was highly informative for some upcoming reviews – stay tuned – and I came away with several pictures that I’m really proud of. But I also got something I didn’t expect: a renewed hope for the future of photography.

As a lifelong photographer and someone whose job is writing about cameras, it’s been a bit easy to fret over the future of the artform. Sales of dedicated cameras are recovering, sure, but they’re still far from what they once were. And while phone photography is just as legitimate, the culture at large treats it as cheap and disposable. Even the most meaningful, carefully considered and composed image becomes another piece of content to look at for half a second while scrolling Instagram.

But walking through the car show in the evening, I found myself surrounded by people with cameras, ranging from DSLR kits that could’ve been purchased at Costco to serious pro photography and video rigs. And while the latter were typically used by professionals and content creators (or people hopeful to join those ranks), plenty of others were people who just really liked cars, and who wanted to take cool photos of them to share with their fellow enthusiasts.

I asked one person walking around with a camera what they were taking photos for, and they said it was basically for their personal enjoyment adding with a laugh that they also post to their 200 followers on Instagram. That’s righteous; as someone who’s successfully turned their hobby into a job, I wish I could occasionally just shoot photos for the love of the game like they were.

A drift car sliding down a track with smoke pouring out from its back tire.
At Formula Drift, shutter drag was the name of the game. But I’ll admit, as an elder Gen Z I might not have thought to try it myself had I not seen all the drift-first photographers doing it.
Canon EOS R1 | RF 70-200mm F2.8 L IS USM Z | 200mm | F18 | 1/40 sec | ISO 100
Mitchell Clark

Even photographing the Formula Drift event itself, the trend held. Several of the people I talked to in the official media pit had started with a love of drift racing, which eventually turned into using photography or video to tell the story of it. Folks there were just as excited about who was winning as they were about the amazing shots they got. That kind of passion is infectious, and they had a lot to teach me. When you start doing photography within a niche, you have a much deeper understanding of what that subculture values, and can push at the edges in a way that a generalist photographer won’t know to.

Not everyone who gets into photography tangentially will think of themselves as a photographer

I suspect there’s actually a pretty strong tie between camera and car culture, and I know that many hobbies have this effect. People will get into something entirely unrelated, want to share it, and discover that the mediums of photo and video are great ways to do it. There’s a storied history of actors, athletes and musicians (yes, including Taylor Swift) picking up photography, and my coworker Abby Ferguson has talked to several photographers with a similar journey in her Behind the Photo series. In it, she showcases people creating amazing work, some of whom started out as VFX artistscellists or divers. Not everyone who gets into photography tangentially will think of themselves as a photographer, but if they’re out there taking pictures, what else should we call them?

Photo of a car drifting around a corner, visible between several people in lime green reflective vests.
The photo pits at the race were filled with image-makers of all stripes. Professional photographers and videographers, drift experts capturing the race, and fans of the sport who had purchased the Photo Experience (and who later shared their very impressive photos in the official media Discord channel). People were using everything from top-end pro cameras, to enthusiast APS-C models; I even saw one person with a Rolleiflex.
Canon EOS R1 | RF 70-200mm F2.8 L IS USM Z | 95mm | F2.8 | 1/400 sec | ISO 8000
Mitchell Clark

I’ll admit that sometimes it’s easy to get a bit high-and-mighty about photography as an artform, as someone who started doing it for its own sake. This person bought an EOS R5C to take photos? Don’t they know there are so many better options? Those Gen Alpha kids are getting into compacts? Don’t they know about all the downsides, and are they even learning the fundamentals?

Whenever I catch myself thinking things like that, I try to take a step back because that attitude is deeply unhelpful. I should be glad whenever anyone picks up a camera and tries to learn it, and realize that shaming people for not knowing everything – even if they’ve been doing it for decades – is going to hurt the medium, not help it.

So snap on. Whether you’re the most dyed-in-the-wool, capital P Photographer, or whether you just picked up a camera to try and show your friends your latest skateboard trick, finished knitting project, favorite car, or anything else. We’re all doing the same thing here: trying to capture the world as we see it, and share that vision with others.

About the Author: Mitchell started taking pictures at 10 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s been a wide-ranging adventure, spanning a wide variety of genres and locales, and occasionally dipping into fascinations with video and filmmaking. They honed their technical knowledge doing documentation, programing and QA, writing for The Verge, and just generally messing around on the computer to see what breaks.

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I’m a camera expert: here’s why the iPhone 18 Pro Max’s rumored big camera feature probably won’t matter

Variable apertures historically haven’t made much of a difference to mobile photography

iPhone-17-Pro-rear-panel-and-camerasApple

The rumor mill around Apple’s upcoming iPhones, set to be announced September 9, has been in full swing for months, and the word on the street is that there’s supposedly one big change coming to the new phone’s cameras: the iPhone 18 Pro Max will get a variable aperture on its main camera. While people have been making this prediction for years, Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman, who has a pretty decent track record, recently threw his weight behind it.

As an iPhone nerd, there are a lot of things that interest me about this. The first is that it marks a return of Apple differentiating the camera on its biggest, most expensive* model. The Pro Max phones have historically received new camera updates first – the 15 Pro Max got the 5x telephoto camera a year before it came to the standard Pro – but we’ve been in a stretch where the cameras on the Pro models have been exactly the same. If this rumor is true, that’s about to change.

But as a photographer and camera reviewer, I’m skeptical whether this change will matter much. Before we get to the reasons why, let’s talk about the theoretical benefits. At a high level, changing your lens’s aperture lets you control how much light is hitting the sensor and your depth of field (i.e., how blurry the background of your photo is). The smaller the aperture (or, counter-intuitively, the higher your F-number), the less light it lets in, and the more of your image will be in focus. Phones, historically, have quite fast lenses; the iPhone 17 Pro’s main camera shoots at a fixed F1.78. 

In bright, sunny conditions, this means the phone has to cope with a lot of light hitting the sensor, resorting to tricks like using extremely low ISOs and very fast shutter speeds. And as phone companies push to make their lenses faster to improve image quality and flexibility in low light, this becomes even harder. Adding an aperture that can stop down to, say, F4, would help take some of that pressure off.

A lighthouse on a rocky shore.
Even photographing a bright white object in the sun, the iPhone is able to compensate for its faster aperture with ultra-quick shutter speeds and low ISOs.
iPhone 15 Pro main camera | F1.78 | 1/7937 sec | ISO 80
Mitchell Clark

It’s worth noting that this would almost certainly be the direction Apple goes in, rather than making one that could open up from F1.78 to, say, F1.2. If it was able to make the lens faster, it already would’ve done so. And for phone photographers, that reduces the potential practical benefits; I’ve personally never run into a situation where it was physically too bright for my phone to cope, so an aperture that can stop down isn’t fixing a problem I currently have (with the one exception of video, where the closer you can get to a shutter speed that’s double your frame rate, the more natural motion will look).

The same is true for the other half of the equation, depth of field. To understand why, we have to introduce the concept of equivalent apertures. A F number is absolute; an F1.8 lens on a phone will transmit the same amount of light per square millimeter of sensor as a full-frame F1.8 will. However, because iPhones use much smaller sensors than traditional cameras, the amount of light gathered over the whole image area and the depth of field won’t be equivalent to what you’d get on a full-frame camera with an F1.8 lens. 

A landscape photo showing a mountain slope covered in trees. Beyond it, rockier, snow-capped mountains rise in the distance.
Even with its fixed F1.78 aperture, I never find myself wishing my iPhone’s lens had more depth of field.
iPhone 15 Pro main camera | F1.78 | 1/9009 sec | ISO 80
Mitchell Clark

The current iPhone 17 Pro main camera has a Type 1/1.28 (71.5mm²) sensor. That means that its F1.78 lens will produce the same depth of field as an F6.1 lens on a full-frame camera. If Apple makes it stop down to, say F4, that would give you a lens with two settings: F6.1 and F13.7 equiv. That’ll definitely make a difference in your available depth of field, but it’ll be a change from “enough” to “more than enough,” rather than making a huge difference to the types of shots you can get in most cases. It also, importantly, won’t make any difference if you want to get the coveted shallow depth of field look that the iPhone currently has to emulate with portrait mode.

Finally, let’s consider some historical context. Back when compact cameras were dominant, many of them used sensors that were similar sizes to the iPhone, and had the ability to change apertures. But while some had actual aperture blades like a traditional lens, others used a Waterhouse stop, moving a plate with a fixed aperture in between the lens and the sensor to stop down when needed.

This is less flexible – you don’t get the stops in between wide open and the plate’s diaphragm – but is mechanically simpler. That’s likely a huge consideration for Apple when it comes to building a device that will be subjected to pretty much every condition and abuse you can think of. This is, after all, a company that replaced a physical home button with a solid state one (and is rumored to have at least considered doing the same for the rest of the phone’s buttons, too).

The Samsung Galaxy S9's camera module
The Samsung Galaxy S9’s main camera had an aperture that could be set to F1.5 or F2.4. The feature didn’t last long.
DPReview

Some compacts also simply slotted in an ND filter, and reported it as a stopped down aperture, since it had the same effect on the incoming light. (It didn’t affect the depth of field, but, again, they already had plenty). Apple could go either of those routes rather than building a standard aperture, and it would have good reason to; going the traditional way may have reliability concerns, and could cost more at a time when Apple’s also being squeezed when it comes to chip pricing and availability.

With that said, we’ve seen phones with physical aperture mechanisms before. Samsung included the feature on the Galaxy S9 and S10, to extremely middling results. You essentially couldn’t tell the difference, and the company ended up dropping the feature. Huawei has several phones in its lineup today with variable apertures, but it essentially never gets a mention on the feature pages, despite how much of them are dedicated to talking about the cameras.

It’s unlikely to be something you notice when it comes to the experience of using your phone as a camera or the photos you get out of it

However Apple decides to implement it, if it does at all, the point is the same: it’s unlikely to be something you actually notice when it comes to the experience of using your phone as a camera or the photos you get out of it. But that’s not to say that Apple has just decided to make one of the most mechanically complex parts of its phones even more complicated for giggles, or that it’ll purely be a marketing gimmick.

To the latter point, I’m honestly 50/50 on whether I think it’ll bring it up in the keynote presentation at all (again, assuming the rumors are even accurate). There’s probably some technical reason why it’ll be nice to have as part of its computational image processing pipeline, and there may even be a slight noticeable benefit to it. And if, by some miracle, Apple has decided to massively increase the size of the camera sensor, then it could genuinely be an important inclusion, though, to be clear, that change hasn’t been rumored at all.

But don’t get your hopes up. At the end of the day, the odds are that iPhone photos will still look like iPhone photos (which is to say: pretty good, for a phone), and that there won’t be an appreciable difference between the camera on the iPhone 18 Pro and the one on the 18 Pro Max… or, for that matter, between the new phone and the one it’s replacing. Sometimes, a change is just a change, no matter how much buzz there is about it leading up to it.

* – Currently most expensive, anyways. Apple is also expected to introduce a folding phone that will almost certainly be priced above the Pro models and that will have worse cameras, if other major foldables are any indication.

About the Author: Mitchell started taking pictures at 10 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s been a wide-ranging adventure, spanning a wide variety of genres and locales, and occasionally dipping into fascinations with video and filmmaking. They honed their technical knowledge doing documentation, programing and QA, writing for The Verge, and just generally messing around on the computer to see what breaks.

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Photoshop’s latest update brings some of Camera Raw’s most-used controls into the app

The Light Adjustment Layer lets you easily adjust brightness, shadows, highlights and more without having to understand curves.

The Adobe Photoshop wordmark on a blue gradient background.Adobe

Adobe has announced a new collection of features for Photoshop, including one that it promises will let you do the type of processing you’d previously have to go to Adobe Camera Raw to do, without leaving the app’s standard workspace.

The feature is called the “Light Adjustment Layer,” which gives you control over brightness, contrast, and whites, highlight, shadow and black levels. Like other adjustment layers, it’s relatively flexible. You can use masks to have it only apply to certain parts of your image, and it’s non-destructive; unlike filters, you can easily tweak or remove it after you’ve added it. 

m_gi_photoshop_Light_Adjustment_LayerAdobe

As with many of the recent features we’ve seen from Adobe, this isn’t necessarily going to unlock new ways of working for Photoshop pros; most of what the layer does could be achieved with Curves and/or Levels adjustment layers. But it makes things that bit easier and friendlier to beginners.

The other major feature in the release takes that even further, introducing a whole new mode to Photoshop that strips away most of the interface. It’s called the ‘AI Assisted Editor’, and it bundles the tools you’d need to do some common and basic tasks into a simpler UI. The company says it’s designed for people who are new to the software and want to use it to make edits, but who might be overwhelmed by trying to figure out which tool to use, and by a layer-based workflow.

m_gi_photoshop_AI_assisted-Editor
The AI Assisted editor mode strips away most of what people think of as the Photoshop UI – the toolbar, layers panel, properties pane and more – and replaces it with a select set of features.
Adobe

As the name implies, many of its features revolve around AI. There’s the maximal version, where you just type a prompt into a box with the edits you want made, which Photoshop will try to carry out using a generative model of your choice, but there are also modes that use some of the other AI tools the company’s built into the app. For example, one pane will let you remove the background, and another will let you remove unwanted objects in your image. Yet another gives you access to the Generative Expand feature, which attempts to fill in the area beyond the edges of your image.

Adobe has also introduced other AI tools, such as the ability to have generative edits using its FireFly models only apply to a masked portion of the image, a “markup” mode that lets you guide generative AI edits with drawings and an option in the task bar that lets you type a prompt that will edit the entire image.

Related: Adobe’s new plan to justify its subscriptions: be a one-stop AI shop

Finally, the company has expanded the dynamic text tool, letting you create text that will adapt to a custom shape or path; previously, it only worked with circular, arched or bowed shapes. It’s also added a panel dedicated to Adobe Stock, letting you access the company’s library of stock images and graphics from right within Photoshop.

The AI Assisted Editor feature is launching in beta, while the other features will be available via an update to the app, coming for free to Creative Cloud subscribers (though, as always, many of the AI features will use some number of credits, which you’ll only have a limited number of per month, depending on your plan).

About the Author: Mitchell started taking pictures at 10 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s been a wide-ranging adventure, spanning a wide variety of genres and locales, and occasionally dipping into fascinations with video and filmmaking. They honed their technical knowledge doing documentation, programing and QA, writing for The Verge, and just generally messing around on the computer to see what breaks.

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The video that sparked a debate about the line between photography and plagiarism

Or: DPReview writers Mitchell and Abby discuss a contentious photography trend.

Photo of a Formula Drift car with a massive trail of smoke coming from its rear tires.Mitchell Clark

Editor’s note: the text of this article was written by Mitchell, which is who is referred to using first-person pronouns. Abby is credited in the article as she makes up half the conversation it’s based on, and gave input on its content. The lede image was taken in real life, not from a television.

It was a title and thumbnail that was bound to get my attention. YouTuber Hunter Creates Things’ video “The Internet’s Most HATED Photography Trend” shows a blurry picture and with the word “tv.” in red. Clicking on it, I thought it was going to be about shutter drag (“TV” being how some brands refer to their cameras’ shutter priority modes), a photographic technique that’s almost inescapable amongst photographers right now. “I can see why people don’t like this,” I thought, “but I’m interested what this person has to say.”

Treat this video as required viewing; the rest of the article probably won’t make much sense if you haven’t seen it.

That’s not at all what it was about. Instead, it’s about a trend I’d totally missed: one where photographers will use their cameras to capture what’s playing on their televisions, often producing an image that looks very different to the one originally broadcast. I reacted… strongly to both the concept and the video about it, immediately sending it to my coworker Abby Ferguson with the message: “not gonna lie, I don’t think I can get behind this.”

This kicked off a conversation that was interesting enough that we thought it’d be worth sharing with you. But first, a bit of background info for context: Abby has an MFA in fine arts, thus is more well-versed in art history and theory than I am. Meanwhile, I have a background in video, and have even filmed sports for television before.

This image by Matthew Johnson is one of the examples Hunter discusses in his video.

When I first shared the video Abby had, unsurprisingly, already heard of the controversy.

Abby: I remember when those photos of the figure skater came out. I also didn't realize at the time that he was just taking photos of his TV and was pretty disappointed. I have very, very mixed feelings about them.

I replied that two of Hunter’s comments got under my skin in particular: the first was his assertion that “neither you or I are qualified to say whether this is good art,” which both of us disagreed with. The second was when he said “The goal of sports broadcast television is not to be art, but these photos don’t have to be information-first, aesthetics second. If you think about it, I don’t think I would ever take a screenshot of ESPN, and put that on my wall.”

Mitchell: Spoken like someone who honestly hasn't watched a sports broadcast in the last… I dunno, decade. They're so well-produced now, and there's clearly artistic shots and compositions on display?

Related: Abby’s interview with a videographer for the Super Bowl Halftime show

Abby: I do kind of get what he's saying with that line actually. Yes, broadcasts do now have artistic shots and compositions, but they are still more in the realm of documentary/photojournalism. These photos (though I kind of have a hard time calling them photos), take a more abstract approach.
Mitchell: Sure. But if I took a screenshot from that and edited it to produce the same effect that the photographers have, I feel like people would rightly call that plagiarism.

There’s never been a clear black and white line

I’m not entirely sure, in retrospect, that this statement holds water. It’s probably more defensiveness based on having been on the opposite side of the TV. Abby pointed out that things are rarely that clear cut.

Abby: Maybe…but in the art world there's a rough understanding that you can take someone's original art and modify it to become your own. There's never been a clear black and white line about HOW modified, so I think these would very much fall into the gray area. They don't look like the original broadcast, so they become something new.

I still have issues with it, but from a legal perspective, I'm not sure they would be considered plagiarism.

We both agreed that things get extra dubious when creators taking pictures of their TV try to obscure what they’re doing, or don’t credit the source. And neither of us thought that taking what is essentially a crop of an existing composition is the same as actually being there and deciding how to capture the scene.

Abby: It feels….lazy? Like he's just doing this from the comfort of his living room while the actual footage is from people working their butts off.
Mitchell: But yeah, to your point, there is an art to the remix
Abby: I like the images, I just wish his process was different. Do that on actual subjects in real life.

In his video, Hunter brings up the 1974 series “TV Shots” from famed photographer Harry Gruyaert, where he also took photographs of his television playing the Olympics, sparking a similar debate. But both Abby and I agreed that Gruyaert’s work just… feels different. There are a lot of potential reasons why. Maybe subconsciously we’re appealing to authority; surely it must be more meaningful when a Magnum photographer does it? Perhaps it’s framing. Gruyaert posed his images as an interrogation of the medium of television itself. Or maybe it’s simply technological. A film photo of a CRT television showing a standard definition broadcast with deliberately wonky colors looks nothing like a photo taken by someone who was actually there. With 4K livestreams, the lines between shots for TV and shots of it blur.

We more or less left the conversation there, as we remembered that we probably had more productive things to do. But it’s also easy to see why we wound up talking about a video that I had mostly sent as a throw-away: it, and the pieces it discuss, relate to a lot of hot-button topics in 2026. Ever since YouTuber HBomberGuy released his four-hour magnum opus on plagiarism, there’s been renewed scrutiny around crediting people’s work (further fueled by how many generative AI systems are trained on existing material), and there are still people who, during debates on what counts as art, bring up Marcel Duchamp submitting a signed urinal* for an exhibition in 1917.

That’s part of what made us decide to share this conversation; obviously, we have our own perspectives, but they’re not going to be the only ones. Consider this the start of a discussion, as we’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on the trend and Hunter’s video. Be sure to join us in the comments below.

* Whether he was the one that signed it is up for debate.

About the Author: Mitchell started taking pictures at 10 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s been a wide-ranging adventure, spanning a wide variety of genres and locales, and occasionally dipping into fascinations with video and filmmaking. They honed their technical knowledge doing documentation, programing and QA, writing for The Verge, and just generally messing around on the computer to see what breaks.

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Ricoh says the GRIIIx will be going away soon – potentially before the next version arrives

It says the decision is thanks to “availability of certain parts ending”

The Ricoh GR IIIx sitting in the center of a plant.Carey Rose

With Ricoh’s announcement of the GR IVx, due out in “winter 2026 or later,” the company has also said that production of the GR IIIx, IIIx HDF, and IIIx Urban Edition cameras will end in October. It specifies that this schedule is for Japan, and notes that “ending dates may differ for overseas regions.”

The GR IIIx and its variants, which feature 40mm equiv. F2.8 lenses, rather than the GR-standard 28mm equiv. model, have long been a bit hard to get your hands on, facing frequent stock issues in the US. That, taken with the company’s citation of the “availability of certain parts ending” in its announcement of the discontinuation, means that this move isn’t necessarily surprising.

What is a bit odd is that it appears to be happening before the GR IVx arrives, at least by a few months. While production ending before doesn’t ensure stock will run out, it won’t help the camera’s availability issues if people who don’t care about the upgrades coming with the IVx rush to get their hands on them before they’re gone. There’s likely to be some extra incentive there too; the GR IV was substantially more expensive than its predecessor and, while Ricoh hasn’t announced pricing for the IVx, we wouldn’t expect that trend to change. 

About the Author: Mitchell started taking pictures at 10 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s been a wide-ranging adventure, spanning a wide variety of genres and locales, and occasionally dipping into fascinations with video and filmmaking. They honed their technical knowledge doing documentation, programing and QA, writing for The Verge, and just generally messing around on the computer to see what breaks.

Want to stay up to date on the latest product news and releases? Add DPReview as a preferred source to ensure our independent journalism makes it to the top of your Google search results.

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Mark your calendars: Apple’s next event is September 9th

iPhone day is almost upon us.

A glowing Apple logo that looks like a rainbow reflection from the sun.Apple

Apple has announced a special event on September 9 at 10am PT (1pm ET / 6pm BST). While the company is characteristically coy about what’ll be announced – basically the only information that it’s shared is the title of the event, which is “surprise and shine” – its early September events are traditionally reserved for new iPhones. 

There was a time when it was relatively easy to predict what would be announced at these events: two sizes of iPhone Pro and one or two sizes of the standard iPhone. But Apple’s roster of annually updated models has expanded, and is rumored to do so further. There’s now a budget model (currently the iPhone 17e) and an ultra-thin phone called the “Air.” If rumors are to be believed, this year’s event will also see the introduction of what would be Apple’s first folding phone, too. 

Based on how Apple’s release schedule has worked in previous years, we wouldn’t expect to see a new “e” model at this event, though there are murmurs that Apple may even defer the launch of the new base model iPhone to a later event. In other words, we’d get what’ll presumably be called the iPhone 18 Pro, but not the standard iPhone 18. 

At the moment, though, that’s all still speculation. Only Apple knows for sure what it has in store, and we’ll find out in around two weeks.  

About the Author: Mitchell started taking pictures at 10 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s been a wide-ranging adventure, spanning a wide variety of genres and locales, and occasionally dipping into fascinations with video and filmmaking. They honed their technical knowledge doing documentation, programing and QA, writing for The Verge, and just generally messing around on the computer to see what breaks.

Want to stay up to date on the latest product news and releases? Add DPReview as a preferred source to ensure our independent journalism makes it to the top of your Google search results.

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OM System teases “something new” coming September 9 — and its EVF is the center of attention

The company is showing way more than usual.

A camera floating against a dark background, light gently falling on its top plate.OM System

OM System is teasing “something new” coming September 9. Whatever it is, the company wants you to know it’ll have an EVF: the video it posted to its social media channels prominently focuses on that particular feature, while showing way more than we’ve come to expect for this kind of pre-announcement teaser.

Usually, companies will post a silhouette of a camera draped in deep shadows, with just a few parts sticking through to suggest its shape. And at first, that’s what OM System’s video seems like, opening with a shot looking through an EVF before presumably showing several sample photos depicting city life. But then, it closes with a shot of a camera floating up through the air with a surprising amount of the top and back plate visible. Sure, there are still plenty of shadows, but we can still see that the camera is using OM System’s familiar design language, and that it’ll have a fair number of controls.

Of course, there’s still plenty the teaser doesn’t reveal; there’s no hint at specs, price or branding. For those, we’ll have to wait until September 9.

About the Author: Mitchell started taking pictures at 10 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s been a wide-ranging adventure, spanning a wide variety of genres and locales, and occasionally dipping into fascinations with video and filmmaking. They honed their technical knowledge doing documentation, programing and QA, writing for The Verge, and just generally messing around on the computer to see what breaks.

Want to stay up to date on the latest product news and releases? Add DPReview as a preferred source to ensure our independent journalism makes it to the top of your Google search results.

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GoPro’s first interchangeable lens camera is now available for $700

The Mission 1 Pro ILS has a Micro Four Thirds mount, opening GoPro’s ecosystem to a world of lenses that action cams haven’t offered.

The GoPro Mission 1 Pro ILS with its lens mount and sensor facing the camera. Beside it is a small Laowa cinema lens.Mitchell Clark

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GoPro is finally releasing the Mission 1 Pro ILS, the tiny video camera with a Micro Four Thirds mount the company announced back in April. The standard Mission 1 Pro, which comes with a fixed lens and a Type 1 (128mm²) sensor, has been available for a while now and represented a big step up from the company’s traditional action cameras, but the version with an interchangeable lens is an even bigger change. 

Like the standard Mission 1 Pro, the ILS’s Type 1 sensor has very fast readout speeds, allowing it to capture 4:3 open gate footage at 8K up to 30p, and at 4K up to 120p. Switch to 16:9 recording, and it can do 60p and 240p, respectively. It can also record using an HLG curve for HDR footage straight out of camera, or in GoPro’s GP-Log2 for more flexibility in post, and supports 32-bit float for audio, to virtually eliminate the risk of your sound clipping. 

GoPro is launching a new app called Mission Monitor

While it’s tempting to see the Mission 1 Pro ILS as an enthusiast camera, there are clear indications that it’s aimed more towards video professionals, and the time we’ve spent with the camera so far supports this. Its Micro Four Thirds mount has no electronic contacts, so it can’t do autofocus, nor does it support the focus-by-wire or electronic aperture actuation required by most of the photo-focused Micro Four Thirds lenses on the market (as in, almost everything from Panasonic or OM System). That also means you’ll need to manually pull focus, and while the camera has assistance tools like focus peaking and magnification, that’s still no easy task if you’re using the 2.59″ rear display. 

Thankfully, alongside the ILS, GoPro is launching a new app for iPhone and iPad called Mission Monitor. It not only lets you use a phone or tablet to preview your image and control the camera on a much larger screen, but also supports tools like focus peaking, LUT view assist and frameline overlays. 

That app mainly operates over USB, rather than Wi-Fi, like the consumer-focused Quik app (though that can be used with this camera, too). This again reinforces that the camera is aimed towards a very different audience than the company’s traditional action cameras. Rather than being a self-contained option that you can set and forget, it’s something you or a dedicated camera operator actively have to manage, likely with the assistance of a rig with tools like a monitor and follow-focus rig. It’s also worth noting that, unsurprisingly, given its lens mount, this is a GoPro that’s only weatherproof, rather than waterproof. 

We plan on doing some more testing with the Mission 1 Pro ILS soon to see how it works for a variety of use cases, including as a tool for photographers, as it also has the ability to take 50MP stills, and an accessory grip that makes it feel more like a traditional compact (albeit one with even less manual control than usual and no autofocus). If you have any questions about it, let us know in the comments below. 

The GoPro Mission 1 Pro ILS is available to pre-order for $700 from the company’s website, which is the same price as the standard Mission 1 Pro (though it’s already on sale at a $100 discount and has a built-in lens). The company says it’ll be available at traditional retailers in September.

About the Author: Mitchell started taking pictures at 10 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s been a wide-ranging adventure, spanning a wide variety of genres and locales, and occasionally dipping into fascinations with video and filmmaking. They honed their technical knowledge doing documentation, programing and QA, writing for The Verge, and just generally messing around on the computer to see what breaks.

Want to stay up to date on the latest product news and releases? Add DPReview as a preferred source to ensure our independent journalism makes it to the top of your Google search results.

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Apple’s new Mac Mini and Mac Studio get faster chips, but AI-era pricing means they’re not the deals they once were

Apple’s latest desktop excel at running the tech that have made them so expensive.

An Apple Mac Studio next to a Studio Display showing a non-linear editor running.Apple

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Apple has updated its popular desktop computers, the Mac Mini and the more powerful Mac Studio. Alongside the new models come new chips: Apple is introducing an “Ultra” model into its M5 lineup, as well as its next generation of processor, the M6. But while the new models are exciting, their prices aren’t; the impacts of AI on RAM and storage pricing are extremely evident here.

The Mac Mini and M6

m_pi_mac_mini_in_handApple

Lets start with the Mac Mini, as it’s Apple’s mainline desktop computer, which will be more than powerful enough for most photographers. The biggest change is internal, as the base level Mac Mini ships with the M6, a new chip in Apple’s lineup. It has a 12-core CPU, made up of two “Super” high-performance cores, 4 “performance” cores for mid-level tasks and 6 “efficiency” cores. The M4 found in the previous generation had 4 “performance” cores – though at the time those were Apple’s fastest cores, closer to what it’d call “super” cores now – and 6 efficiency cores. The chip can now access its memory slightly faster, with 170GB/s of bandwidth, up from 120GB/s. Likewise, the GPU has two additional cores for a total of 12.

Apple says the M6 “is built using cutting-edge 2 nm process” (though, as is typical, that doesn’t necessarily mean all, or even any, of its features actually measure 2nm), and that it includes a “Dual 16-core Neural Engine” that can provide double the performance in on-device AI tasks compared to the M5. The company also claims the M6 has 1.2 times faster single-core performance than the previous-gen (not that you could buy the Mac Mini with that chip in it).

You can also now get the Mac Mini with the same M5 Pro chip found in the company’s MacBook Pros. While it’s built on an older process, it offers more cores – starting with 15 CPU cores and 16 GPU cores, and going up to an 18-core CPU and 20-core GPU – and higher memory and SSD capacity. The M6 Mac Mini can handle up to 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD; with the M5 Pro version, that expands to 64GB and 8TB, respectively. And while the M6 Mac Mini’s Thunderbolt ports are still the fourth-gen versions that can run up to 40Gbps, the M5 Pro’s are Thunderbolt 5, which can reach up to 80Gbps (or 120Gbps in an asynchronous mode). 

m_pi_mac_mini_running_topaz_denoiseApple

Outside of the updated processors, not much has changed about the Mini’s capabilities. It still has three ThunderBolt Ports, two USB-C ports and an HDMI port, and can drive up to three external displays. Apple updated its Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to versions 6 and 7 respectively (the latter being a very welcome addition). Likewise, the Ethernet port has been updated, too; it’s now a 2.5Gb model, rather than a 1Gb one, which will be a big upgrade for anyone who often finds themselves transferring large files over the network. Of course, you can still upgrade to a 10Gb ethernet port for $100 at time of purchase.

These upgrades don’t come cheap, though. When the M4 Mac Mini launched in late 2024, you could get a model with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD for $599. However, following the skyrocketing prices of DRAM chips, Apple recently got rid of that model, and the base level became the $799 version with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. The M6 version comes in at $899, but drops the SSD back down to 256GB. You still get 16GB of memory. While the starting price has “only” jumped $100 compared to yesterday, you’re getting less for more money than you would’ve previously, and much less compared to what you would’ve been able to buy a year ago. 

These upgrades don’t come cheap

The story is slightly less painful with the M5 Pro model. The previous version with an M4 Pro launched for $1,399 with 24GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, while the new model is $1699 for those same specs.

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Pelican’s 35L camera backpack fixes a frustrating part of traveling with cameras

Its padded insert is designed to transition between hard case and carryable in a moment’s notice.

The Pelican 35L backpack on a tan background.Pelican

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Pelican, the company famous for its ultra-rugged hard cases, is introducing a new backpack aimed squarely at photographers and creators. The not-so-catchily-named PX35 Aegis 35L Creator Backpack is made out of durable 500D Cordura fabric, lets you access your camera without taking it off and has a removable insert that can be directly transferred into one of its Air or Protector cases.

As its name implies, the pack has a 35L capacity, which is mainly in its large central compartment. You can access that space from the top of the bag, from the back, or from either side. The main flap, which has a variety of zippered and elastic pouches and a laptop pocket, can fully unzip, giving you unobstructed access to the pack’s interior. There’s also a small brain area on top with hard padding and space for various accessories like multitools, headphones and passports, and the front has MOLLE attachment points and a front flap that can be clipped up to hold oversized items like tripods or jackets.

A bag with its rear flap open, showing an internal cube filled with camera gear.
Pelican says the bag is designed for “carry-on compliance on most airlines.”
Pelican

Included with the bag is a removable padded divider, with compartments you can configure to hold your specific gear, be that camera bodies, lenses, small drones or a mixture thereof. The pouch is removable, making it easy to take out at a moment’s notice. It’s also designed to fit in the company’s Pelican Protector 1510 and Pelican Air 1535 hard cases, so you can keep your gear secure during air or ground travel, then pull the insert out and slide it into your pack when you get wherever you’re going. This means you don’t have to repack all your gear when you get where you’re going, which can be an annoying process, especially if you haven’t quite accounted for differences in capacities or layouts.

The company says the pack has a “rigid, protective shell” to keep your gear protected, but also says it’s a “last mile solution” that’s not as heavy or protective as its hard cases. To that end, it’s also not completely waterproof, though Pelican says it’s “weather-resistant” on its own, and comes with a rain fly.

The brain compartment of a black backpack, filled with items like a passport, tool, headphones.Pelican

The pack’s ruggedness comes at a cost that’s both weight and monetary. It comes in at 5.4lbs (2.45kg) on its own, and costs $325. To manage the former, it has an integrated but unpadded hipbelt, as well as a sternum strap, complete with a whistle integrated into the clip. And while the price is definitely on the high end – it’s around an $80 premium compared to one of DPReview managing editor Dale Baskin’s favorite packs – it’s not unheard of if you’re comparing it to options from companies like Peak Design, once you factor in its inclusion of a padded divider.

The bag comes in black or “charcoal sage” green, and has a five-year warranty. 

About the Author: Mitchell started taking pictures at 10 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s been a wide-ranging adventure, spanning a wide variety of genres and locales, and occasionally dipping into fascinations with video and filmmaking. They honed their technical knowledge doing documentation, programing and QA, writing for The Verge, and just generally messing around on the computer to see what breaks.

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The LK Samyang AF 60-180mm F2.8 shows just how far budget lenses have come

Take a look through our sample gallery to see how well this budget fast zoom lens for E- and, soon, L-mount performs.

A 3/4 view of the LK Samyang 60-180mm F2.8 against a gray background.Mitchell Clark

Earlier this summer, LK Samyang announced the AF 60-180mm F2.8, its latest lens that it says was developed in collaboration with German optics company Schneider-Kreuznach. We’ve had the chance to test it out the version for E-mount (though the company has recently announced it’ll be available for L-mount next week), shooting with it in a variety of conditions to produce a sample gallery, and forming some impressions along the way.

In use

The thing I immediately noticed about this lens was its weight, as it comes in at just 730g (1.6lbs). According to LK Samyang, it’s the lightest option in this class, and I found that difference noticeable. It was very easy to carry around, even for extended shooting sessions. While the lens extends as you zoom in, this doesn’t result in a substantial shift in its center of gravity, which is always nice when changing focal lengths.

Speaking of, though, the zoom ring might be the lens’s weakest point. It has a nice textured rubber coating, but can be a bit difficult to turn with any amount of precision, as it’s quite stiff, but inconsistently so; I sometimes had to work to turn it from 60mm, before finding myself in an easy patch sailing right through the focal length I wanted. It’s not end of the world, and I got used to it with practice, but it is a reminder that you’re using a budget lens. 

The LK Samyang AF 60-180mm F2.8 FE against a gray background, extended to its 180mm setting.
The lens doesn’t extend very far when going from 60mm to 180.
Mitchell Clark

The lens is also made out of a plastic that isn’t the most premium-feeling. Nor does the customizable control button, though it’s a nice inclusion. Finally, LK Samyang has added a lock switch to keep the lens at 60mm while you’re walking around with it, though I found the mechanism’s stiffness was enough to keep it from accidentally extending. However, it does hold it incredibly well; I once accidentally locked the lens, and was completely unable to turn the zoom ring until I discovered what had happened.

It focuses quite quickly, though it’s not the absolute fastest I’ve ever experienced. That’s not surprising given that it uses stepping motors rather than linear ones, but it should be more than acceptable for everything but the fastest of action. I also appreciated its close focusing abilities, as it has a minimum focusing distance of just 0.35m (1.2′) at the wide end, letting me get quite close to my subject, which suits my style of shooting. Unlike the zoom ring, the manual focus ring is perfectly pleasant to use.

A golden retriever wearing goggles stands over a smaller border collie on the back of a blue convertible. According to a sticker conveniently covered by its paw, the larger dog's name is Ashtray, and the smaller dog's name is Cherry.
Sony a7R V w/ LK Samyang AF 60-180mm F2.8 @ 80mm | F4.5 | 1/160 sec | ISO 100

While this lens is in some ways competing with the venerable 70-200mm F2.8 options available from Sony, Panasonic and Sigma, its closest competitor is the Tamron 70-180mm F2.8 Di III VC VXD G2, a lens I tested out earlier this year. In my mind, there’s no clear winner between the two; the Tamron weighs a bit more, but its body and controls feel a bit nicer (or, in the case of the zoom ring, a fair bit nicer). It also has optical image stabilization, snappy autofocus motors and access to the special features Tamron’s been adding to its lineup via its app. But then I also found myself appreciating the ability to go that bit wider with the Samyang. And both have image quality that would’ve been unthinkable at this price range just a few years ago, though the vignetting at F2.8 is perhaps a touch less noticeable on the Samyang.

It’s nice that there’s another budget option for a fast tele-zoom for E-mount, and one that’s quite capable for its price. It’s perhaps more exciting that it’s coming for L-mount, where there aren’t that many lightweight, budget tele options. It’s also nice to see that Samyang doesn’t seem to be waiting a long time between releasing lenses for the system after announcing them for E-mount.

Sample gallery

Please do not reproduce any of these images on a website or any newsletter/magazine without prior permission (see our copyright page). We make the originals available for private users to download to their own machines for personal examination or printing; we do so in good faith, so please don’t abuse it. 

Thanks to Sony for the loan of an a7R V to shoot this gallery. All images were processed using our standard lens workflow in Capture One, with the manufacturer’s distortion correction applied but no correction of vignetting. The profile corrects a fair amount of barrel distortion at the wide and some pincushion distortion at the long end. It’s enough that we’d recommend using the corrections if you can, though we don’t consider them an essential part of the lens’s design.

Loading gallery…

About the Author: Mitchell started taking pictures at 10 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s been a wide-ranging adventure, spanning a wide variety of genres and locales, and occasionally dipping into fascinations with video and filmmaking. They honed their technical knowledge doing documentation, programing and QA, writing for The Verge, and just generally messing around on the computer to see what breaks.

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GXAce is making a panoramic camera “built specifically for photography” and sharing the journey

The GX-P1 will reportedly be a fixed-lens digital camera designed to shoot XPan-inspired 65:24 images.

A top-down image of a small camera against a dark background, with the title GX-Pan.GXAce

Photography YouTuber Casey Cavanaugh, also known as GXAce, is working on something new: a camera called the GX-P1. Cavanaugh has been teasing the camera for a few weeks, and there’s still a lot more we don’t know, but a newsletter he wrote, seen by PetaPixel, has shed a bit more light on what it’ll look like.

According to PetaPixel, the GX-P1 will be a fixed lens digital camera that shoots images in the 65:24 aspect ratio popularized by the Hasselblad XPan. The goal is to make a camera “built specifically for photography,” something Cavanaugh says “not a single camera company seems to want to do.” His goal is to crowdfund the camera later this year, though there’s apparently still quite a lot of work to be done.

The goal is to make a camera “built specifically for photography”

While the ultra-wide format has a number of dedicated fans, there aren’t that many options if you want to shoot it these days. Fujifilm built a setting for the aspect ratio into the GFX100RF, and Panasonic has built support for it into many of its full-frame cameras, but it’s far from common. But even if you have no interest in a camera dedicated to it, there could still be reasons to follow the GX-P1 project.

According to PetaPixel, Cavanaugh plans on publishing videos about the process of creating the camera, offering a rare inside look into what it takes to build a digital camera from the ground up. As he himself points out in his review of the Pixii Max, a small, independent team’s journey to bring a camera to market will look very different than that of a major company that has experience, existing relationships and economies of scale, but I’m still excited to see the process.

Cavanaugh is working with designer and creative director Ash Thorp, who has worked on movies like 2022’s The Batman and 2023’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and the GXAce videos place a heavy emphasis on aesthetics, so I suspect we’ll get a lot of information about the work that went into the physical design the camera. So far, the team has only shown a few photos of the device, revealing what looks like an optical viewfinder, top plate informational display and a control dial.

We’ll have to wait until Cavanaugh releases more information, or the first video of the series, to find out more, but we’ll be eagerly waiting for the first episode.

About the Author: Mitchell started taking pictures at 10 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s been a wide-ranging adventure, spanning a wide variety of genres and locales, and occasionally dipping into fascinations with video and filmmaking. They honed their technical knowledge doing documentation, programing and QA, writing for The Verge, and just generally messing around on the computer to see what breaks.

Want to stay up to date on the latest product news and releases? Add DPReview as a preferred source to ensure our independent journalism makes it to the top of your Google search results.

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Caira review: the clever connected AI camera still has a lot to learn

Camera Intelligence has a lot of good ideas and tech, but it doesn’t quite all add up to a camera that’s enjoyable to use.

The Camera Intelligence Caira with no lens on, showing the sensor.Mitchell Clark

The Camera Intelligence Caira is something between a dedicated camera and a phone accessory. It has its own Micro Four Thirds mount, an 11.4MP sensor and a Snapdragon processor to handle computational tasks like multi-exposure image stacking, and autofocus and white balance calculations. However, it only has a single control – a shutter button – and no display. To actually use it, you need an iPhone (specifically, as it won’t work with an Android phone), which physically connects to the back of the Caira using MagSafe and digitally connects to it via Wi-Fi for liveview and control.

It’s also a camera that’s all-in on AI for both shooting and editing. It uses the tech to control autofocus, white balance and exposure while you’re taking a picture, and, after you’ve captured the scene, you can change it using an editor powered by Google’s “Nano Banana” generative AI model. The app gives you preset changes, like removing clutter from a scene, changing eye-lines and applying a VHS-style filter, as well as a chatbot to make more arbitrary changes, or to get feedback on the image you’ve taken. However, that bits that deal with generative AI are optional (and, indeed, require a monthly subscription), so we’ll mainly be focusing on how the Caira behaves as a camera.

The Caira is available for pre-order for $1000, though there’s more to the availability story.

Key Specifications

  • Micro Four Thirds mount
  • 11.4MP ~Four Thirds (244mm2) BSI CMOS sensor w/ Quad Bayer
  • Brightness-map HDR JPEG output
  • Qualcomm Snapdragon processor
  • MagSafe mount for iPhone
  • AI exposure, white balance and autofocus
  • Built-in generative AI-powered editor
  • 64GB internal storage

Note: this review was written after using the camera with several beta firmware versions provided by Camera Intelligence, and extensive use with the latest version.


Body, handling and controls

A rear view of the Camera Intelligence Caira with an iPhone attached.
There’s something striking about the Caira’s design. Pretty much any time I’ve used it in front of other people (including non-photographers), I’ve gotten comments on or questions about it.
Mitchell Clark

The Caira’s body is made out of aluminum, and it’s a nice-feeling physical object. There are only a few features on it: a (disappointingly vague) shutter button, the lens mount, a power button, a USB C port for charging and 3.5mm microphone jack. It also has a cold shoe for mounting accessories.

While I found it relatively comfortable to hold in one hand, using my thumb to control it and index finger to press the shutter, I couldn’t help but worry about the connection between the camera body and my phone. Apple’s MagSafe is relatively robust, but it still just relies on magnets, which are only strong in certain directions. When I’m using the Caira, it’s hard not to imagine bumping my phone wrong and sending it crashing to the ground.

Screenshot showing the Caira's shooting interface with the control for Aperture selected, but set to auto.
To switch between auto and manual control, you can start dragging the slider, or tap on the icon for the parameter. Tapping on the focus icon (the one at the top) lets you switch between manual, single, and continuous focus modes.
Mitchell Clark

Speaking of my phone, most of the camera’s interface is actually in its companion app. It connects to the camera via Wi-Fi, and provides controls for various parameters: aperture, shutter speed, ISO, exposure compensation and focus. You can also set the controls to “Advanced” to change lens distortion correction and white balance temperature / tint.

By default, the controls are collapsed, and the camera handles exposure and white balance automatically. If you tap a button to gain access to the controls, though, you can then tap the icon for each parameter to turn it into manual mode, and control it using a slider. I’ve found this to be okay for controlling focus – the camera has some decent assist tools – but not so great for exposure; the sliders make it easy to make big adjustments, but fine-grained ones like picking F4 instead of F3.5 or 4.5 require a fair amount of concentration. This is a camera best used in auto mode, with manual intervention only when necessary.

Screenshot from the Caira app, showing an explanation for what a setting does.
The Caira does a genuinely great job at communicating at what its different settings do, with each having a detailed explanation. Though they can get slightly annoying if you’re changing something for the dozenth time.
Mitchell Clark

I found that the Caira works best with smaller, lighter lenses (the kind that are thankfully abundant in the Micro Four Thirds ecosystem). I used it a bit with the OM System 12-40mm F2.8 II Pro, and found it a difficult to keep steady with how front-heavy it was; it’s difficult to compose when the preview is jittery and bouncy. It was still workable, but I don’t think I’d want to shoot with anything much bigger, and preferred using small primes.


Image Quality

Before we dive into image quality, a note on the sensor. Very much like the Panasonic’s GH5S, the Caira uses a slightly oversized Four Thirds sensor, that allows you to use different region of the sensor to produce different aspect ratios. But while the Panasonic went up to 10.2MP in its 4:3 mode, the Caira allows you to go up to 11.4MP in its 3:2 mode. This essentially uses the standard Micro Four Thirds sensor height but extends around 10% further than usual, horizontally.

This is because, rather than limiting itself to using the sensor area covered by the Micro Four Thirds imaging circle, it instead uses that extended region, warning you that your lenses may or may not be able to project light onto the whole thing. So far, all the lenses I’ve tested with it have performed well, with no notable vignetting in the corners, but it’s worth keeping in mind that there’s a potential trade-off between maximum compatibility and resolution.

And you may want to think twice before giving up any resolution, as the Caira captures less detail than most other cameras you can buy today. That’s not to say that it’s insufficient – the photos it takes will look great on social media and most computer monitors and small prints – but you don’t have to zoom or crop in far before things start to look a little soft. It also has a base ISO of 400, so the cleanest images you can get out of it will still be 1EV noisier than most other Four Thirds sensor cameras, at least in its single-shot mode. However, there’s a good reason why.

One of the Caira’s tricks is that, as we’ve seen with the Sigma BF and Hasselblad X2D II, its JPEGs contain embedded gain maps to produce an HDR effect. When shooting a high-contrast scene, the camera is reducing exposure to retain as much highlight information as possible (a task it didn’t always do successfully; I have a lot of pictures with clipped highlights). Then, it’s raising the shadows in the JPEG to produce an image that looks correct, but that includes dazzling highlights.

This is actually a method of shooting we often advocate for, given the strong dynamic range performance of modern sensors, so it’s interesting to see a camera that actually does it with relative success, even if it doesn’t seem like this sensor is the absolute best fit for that style of shooting. It would also explain why the camera’s base ISO is 400, as it’s trying to capture one additional stop of highlights, compared with the ISO 200 modes on most Micro Four Thirds cameras designed to shoot in SDR.

While the camera’s low-light mode can stack up to 16 images together, the results are usually still relatively noisy, without a ton of detail. The process also won’t work with a moving subject. Still, in some circumstances it can result in decent images, but it’s definitely worth taking the name of the feature seriously: it’s a low light mode, not a no-light mode. It also reduces the amount of manual control you have, understandably locking shutter speed and ISO into auto, as those parameters start to mean less as you stack exposures.

Both cameras were set to auto and told to set focus and aperture on the same flower. Note that the iPhone is set to shoot using its 24MP mode.

It’s hard to directly compare a more traditional camera with a phone, as the latter is always doing a lot of heavy lifting with computation, where the Caira currently only uses a single exposure outside of its low-light mode. However, I found that my iPhone 15 Pro was typically better at focus and making the lightness and white balance more true-to-life. What the Caira could do that it can’t, though, is use Micro Four Thirds lenses that provide more flexibility in focal lengths and deliver pleasing bokeh that comes from optics, rather than computation. Even when I didn’t prefer how the Caira interpreted the scene (or was annoyed that it missed focus), the photos had an undeniable look to them that phones still can’t replicate.


Autofocus and performance

Screenshot of the Caira app showing the focus point.
The Caira has a simple tap-to-focus interface with a single point.
Mitchell Clark

The Caira has three autofocus modes: single, continuous and manual. It has a single size autofocus point, and you tap on the screen to choose its location. It can recognize faces, which it can use to track a person as they move through the frame, though you can also tell it to focus on a non-human subject even when there’s a face in the frame. Outside of tracking faces, though, the autofocus point doesn’t attempt to stick to the object you put it over if it or the camera moves; it stays in the same position in the frame.

I’d be tempted to complain about the lack of generic subject tracking, but I won’t. The camera seemingly used to have it prior to the continuous autofocus update (that, or it was just extremely overeager when it came to identifying things as faces), and it was incredibly frustrating, wandering off the subject and resetting to its original point just before I was going to take a picture, with no way to turn it off. It’s a pity to not have it as a function, but better to have a system that predictably works for the things you ask it to do than one that gives you false hope.

Camera Intelligence gives you several options for how you want the focus to behave when you half-press the shutter, as well as manual focusing assistance tools, like a tiny, low-contrast “rangefinder” patch that you can line up with your subject to ensure focus, and a much more reasonably-sized magnified window that appears when you half-press the shutter in manual focus mode (though it’s rendered in black-and-white, rather than color).

Autofocus performance

Photo of a marmot about to enter a large black pipe.
Camera Intelligence Caira | OM System 12-40mm F2.8 Pro II | 40mm | F2.8 | 1/161 sec | ISO 400

The Caira doesn’t use a traditional contrast-based or phase-detection system for AF. Instead, it uses “custom-trained neural networks running on the camera to estimate from the preview feed exactly how far and in which direction to move the lens to bring the image into focus,” according to Liam Donovan, the company’s CTO. The camera also uses different algorithms for single-shot and continuous AF.

I found the single-shot mode to be, broadly, quite frustrating. It’s sometimes capable of nailing focus, but never feels confident. I have sequences of images where it would get the first exposure sharp, then drift out of focus in subsequent shots, and it typically ends up hunting quite a lot.

This behavior will still happen occasionally in the continuous mode, but it’s overall less indecisive and my hit rate with it was much higher. That’s not to say that its autofocus is as good as most of the other cameras I test – there were plenty of relatively easy situations where it still completely missed focus – but it was at least usable, which isn’t how I’d describe the single-shot algorithm.

The live view preview is compressed to the point where it’s difficult to tell if the image is soft because of focus

There’s another issue with the focus though, which makes it even harder to trust. The live view preview, transmitted over Wi-Fi, is compressed to the point where it’s very difficult to tell if the image is soft because it’s completely out of focus, or if it’s just the low-quality video stream. This would be one thing if I could trust the AF system to get it right all or most of the time, but since I can’t, it makes getting sharp images out of the camera that much more difficult.

Speed

The Caira app is responsive on my iPhone 15 Pro, though that isn’t surprising given it’s a relatively modern flagship phone. What isn’t as snappy is the camera’s readout speed. The camera doesn’t have a mechanical shutter, so you’re stuck using the E-shutter, which takes 50.7ms to read out in stills mode. This means that any fast-moving subjects will have substantial rolling shutter distortion, and there’s a risk of banding when shooting under artificial lighting.

Using Wi-Fi, the pictures can also take a beat to transfer from the camera to the phone, and the app can occasionally get confused during this process if you try to review a photo too early, showing you your previous photo rather than the low-res preview of the incoming one.


A camera tied to a phone

The Camera Intelligence Caira with an iPhone 15 Pro attached to the back and a lens on.
As you can see, it’s hard to get the phone aligned perfectly straight with the camera, as that’s not one of MagSafe’s strengths. That, combined with the lack of a level display in the app, have made it extraordinarily difficult for me to get straight horizons in the pictures I’ve taken with the Caira.
Mitchell Clark

That aforementioned blocky, soft autofocus preview is just one symptom of the Caira’s total reliance on the iPhone it’s attached to. Shooting with it made me realize that I take the integration of a traditional camera for granted. If I see a shot I want to take, I can pull the camera out and, typically with a flick of my finger, turn it on and take the picture.

This was not the case with the Caira. Even in the best-case scenario, capturing a moment with it requires unlocking my phone (a process that, occasionally, means putting in a passcode), and waiting a beat for the Caira app to get back up to speed.

But just as often, it meant doing that, then having to switch back to the app from whatever I had previously been doing on my phone – looking at a map, texting my wife, sharing photos, or whatever else I needed my phone for – and having to reconnect to the Caira’s Wi-Fi, since it only stays connected to your phone for a (thankfully customizable) set period of time. And that’s assuming I even had my phone attached to it, which I wouldn’t always, since having a camera and lens stuck on the back makes it hard to use as, you know, a phone.

Screenshot of an error message in the Caira app saying that the phone is having trouble connecting to the camera.
I saw this error a lot. Not because the Caira’s Wi-Fi was flakey – I only had genuine problems a few times throughout my testing – but because I’d try to connect my phone to it just a second or two before it was ready, kicking of several seconds of waiting before I could try again.

As a reviewer, I typically try to set aside my personal preferences when evaluating a product. Even if I, say, prefer 35mm to 28mm, I won’t hold the choice of the latter against a compact camera. However, the multi-step process required to take a picture with this camera was genuinely a massive barrier to me wanting to use it. I frequently saw something that I wanted to take a photo of, but ended up not bothering because of the hassle of having to wait for the camera to turn on (which takes around 15 seconds), then wait for my phone to connect to its Wi-Fi; a process that I mustn’t start even a second before the camera is ready, otherwise I’ll have to wait for the phone to fail to connect before telling it to retry.

It’s also worth saying explicitly: the only reason I’m even able to have these complaints is because I’m an iPhone user. If I had an Android phone, I couldn’t use the camera at all. It’s completely unusable without its iOS-only app.

It’s completely unusable without its app

This approach isn’t without its benefits, though. The wireless connection between camera and phone means you have near-unlimited flexibility when it comes to how you frame your shots, since you can pull your phone off the body while maintaining the preview, as long as you don’t stray too far away from the Caira. You can also remotely adjust its settings and trigger the shutter.

Despite how good many camera apps have become, the Caira is by far the easiest camera to share photos from, as they’re downloaded as soon as I take them. While some camera apps have a similar function, it requires manually starting the app and connecting it to the camera; of course, the Caira requires this too, but you’ll never forget to do it, as it’s a prerequisite for even being able to use the camera.

It has its own storage, but the photos – Raws and JPEGs – are also dumped straight into my Apple Photos library, where they’ll automatically sync with all my devices via iCloud. It’s really nice coming back from a shoot, opening my laptop, and immediately having access to all the pictures I just took.

It’s also rare that I’ve used a dedicated camera with a screen as good as my iPhone 15 Pro’s. Not only is it larger and higher-resolution than the typical camera screen and bright enough to be visible in most conditions, it can also easily display the HDR images the Caira takes in their full glory.


The future of cameras?

A potted plant grows in front of a window covered in a rainbow geometric sticker.
An example of the brightness-mapped JPEGs that the Caira uses to produce HDR images.
Camera Intelligence Caira | Olympus 8-25mm F4 | 11mm | F4.1 | 1/790 sec | ISO 400 | Firmware v1.5.6 Beta | GPS data removed with Exiftool
Mitchell Clark

Unsurprisingly, given the Caira’s ties to phone photography, it joins the relatively small ranks of cameras that shoot for HDR output by default. We’ve seen some other camera manufacturers start to adopt similar techniques, especially now that it’s possible to create backwards-compatible files that will display as standard JPEGs if your hardware or software doesn’t understand or can’t display the gain map. However, it goes further than any other camera I’ve tested, though, providing several “levels” of HDR effect, ranging from “Subtle” to “Extreme.”

When enabling the latter, the app even warns you that images taken with the setting will be displayed using your screen’s full capabilities, and that it could even compromise quality on older devices. Despite this, and somewhat ironically given the name, I found the differences in the images taken at the various settings to be quite subtle, and the camera doesn’t appear to adjust its metering (and hence highlight capture) based on how much HDR effect you’re asking it to apply. The differences are small enough to make me wonder if the feature is even working as intended, as is the fact that setting HDR to “Disabled” still results in images with an embedded brightness map that light up my MacBook and iPhone’s screen.

Whichever setting it’s at, the Caira’s HDR implementation has become appreciably more subtle and pleasing after a few software updates. Donovan says the company redid it to make sure it got things right, and represented colors accurately.

Stacks of white sake barrels with ornate paintings on them.
A shot taken using an early version of the Caira’s firmware.
Camera Intelligence Caira | OM System 20mm F1.4 | F4 | 1/1231 sec | ISO 400
Mitchell Clark

Because so much about the Caira is defined by software, it’s comparatively easy for the Camera Intelligence team to update it, often in substantial and fundamental ways. During my time testing the camera, the company has improved the image processing in a way that genuinely leads to much nicer-looking pictures, and has added features I consider to be vital, like an exposure compensation control.

There are still improvements to be found – I found the camera still occasionally gets white balance and colors quite wrong, and some of my night mode shots ended up with corrupted rows of pixels – but, unlike other camera companies, I strongly suspect Camera Intelligence will keep working on it.

I wouldn’t mind seeing other manufacturers focus more on addressing user feedback and making improvements after a camera’s release

While the Caira was arguably released in a much less finished state than most cameras, with its barely-working AF and lack of critical features, I wouldn’t mind seeing other manufacturers focus more on addressing user feedback and making improvements after a camera’s release. While there are some that do – Panasonic and Nikon deserve a shout out for their most recent models – it’s rarely with the same speed as Camera Intelligence (which, in fairness, only has to support a single model).

Photo of a silky white flower, illuminated by a street light.
Camera Intelligence Caira | Olympus 8-25mm F4 Pro | 11mm | F4 | 1/24 sec | ISO 8588 | Low Light mode, 16 stacked frames

I also appreciate the phone-like use of stacking to improve image quality in low-light, with no requirement to assemble the image in post, as we’ve seen with other cameras. While there are definitely benefits to the single-shot exposures, having the option to do multi-shot stacking would be a nice addition to smaller-sensor cameras (and, indeed, is a welcome inclusion on cameras from companies like OM System and Panasonic). Camera Intelligence also says that it’s working on a multi-shot high-resolution mode which, again, I would expect to be very easy to use, not requiring a desktop app to put it all together.

Finally, there’s the camera’s voice control mode, which theoretically lets you issue commands to your phone to control the camera in everyday language. I say theoretically because half the time it either missed what I said, or just decided to ignore it. When it worked, though, I could see the bones of a useful feature. I could do basic commands like “take a picture” or “shoot in black and white,” but I could also ask it to do things like “make the background less blurry,” and watch it adjust the aperture.

Screenshot of the Caira's UI showing it incorrectly setting the aperture to F4 while also showing that it heard the command to set it to F5.6 correctly.
I asked the camera to set the aperture to F5.6. It understood the words… and then set it to F4.
Mitchell Clark

That could be really powerful for people who don’t know photography terms, but was unfortunately a very mixed bag. Basic asks like “make this picture brighter” yielded no results, and requests that it did understand were sometimes clunky. If the aperture was in auto mode, asking it to change anything about it would only switch the aperture setting to manual. It didn’t fully implement my request until I repeated it, making it a two-step process. And sometimes when I asked it to make my background less blurry, it’d pick something sensible, like F7.1. Other times, it’d stop the lens all the way down to F22. It did this in the same shooting conditions, so it’s not the result of it being clever about how much light was in the scene.

Oh, and if I did try to do things manually and tell it to “set my aperture to F4” or F8, it consistently set it to something other than what I asked. It would show on the screen that it heard me say F4, then I’d watch as the aperture slider moved to… F5. F8 was F7.1, and a request for F16 got me F14.

Beyond a reliance on an external device, there are other aspects of the Caira that I wouldn’t like to see carried over to traditional cameras. While the company says it’s added additional guardrails to the Google Nano Banana generative AI editing, beyond what the model itself enforces, I’m still not a fan of changing the reality of what was captured. I believe the imperfections in images, and the challenge of working around less-than-ideal shooting conditions, are vital parts of the craft. I don’t like the idea of a future where photographers get used to just fixing it in post the way filmmakers creating a fictional narrative do, or where its the norm to assume that every photo you see has been altered with AI (though it may be too late for the latter).


The Kickstarter of it all

I suspect most people won’t come away from this review planning on buying the Caira, but if you have, a word of caution. Before working on the Caira, the same team made a similar product called the Alice camera, which was initially sold via crowdfunding site IndieGoGo. Despite the camera being available in retail stores, there are backers who have complained as recently as March of this year that they haven’t received the cameras they paid for in 2021. When we asked the team about the unfulfilled orders late last year, they said clearing their backlog was their “highest priority,” and detailed the logistical and legal hurdles that had led to the shipments being delayed.

While the Caira’s Kickstarter is far less overdue, its comments section is still full of people asking where their camera is, and bemoaning the lack of communication from the company. Camera Intelligence is still putting out updates to backers, but they’re not terribly frequent. It’s also selling preorders on the dedicated Caira website, which a bit of an uncomfortable look when the team is still working on fulfilling its Kickstarter backlog for two separate projects.


Conclusion

Reviewing a camera like the Caira is hard, because it’s such a moving target. If I had written this a few months ago when I first received the camera, it would’ve been a very different conversation. It’s been impressive seeing the camera go from something that, frankly, barely worked, to something that’s genuinely okay to use.

However, over that time I’ve also discovered firsthand why previous attempts at this kind of camera/phone accessory hybrid from companies like Sony and DxO haven’t really taken off, despite being released in an era where smartphone’s cameras were far less capable on their own. The vast collection of AI features and tech built into the Caira hasn’t fixed the inherent clunkiness to the experience of an app-reliant camera. True, it improves on the smartphone by giving you access to a larger sensor and interchangeable lens mount, but so would buying a traditional ILC, which will give you a far more enjoyable shooting experience.

Photo of a building at night, with two vertical windows. The top one glows orange, the bottom, purple.
Camera Intelligence Caira | OM System 8-25mm F4 Pro | 25mm | F4.1 | Low Light mode, 16 stacked frames
Mitchell Clark

And that’s a shame, since there are some really good ideas in the Caira, even if many of them are still at the “has promise” stage of implementation. And the team behind it clearly has talent; the fact that they built a working AI-powered autofocus and exposure system and multishot-stacking algorithm from the ground up is impressive, despite still feeling like they need a lot of work.

Camera Intelligence bills the Caira as a camera for creators, for those who want good photos and video without having to understand how to make those. Unfortunately, it’s not there yet. Even as an experienced photographer, I often struggled to get it to do what I wanted, largely thanks to the autofocus system and controls. The results it produced weren’t enough of a step up from my (much easier to use) phone to justify the extra bulk of carrying it around, and the multi-step process to take a picture. Plus, the lack of stabilization combined with its somewhat awkward ergonomics can make previewing your image a bit of a pain unless you have rock-steady hands.

Still, my time with the camera was enough to make me hope that Camera Intelligence is able to stick around to keep working on the Caira so it can reach its full potential, and to continue talks with other camera makers who may be interested in using their technology. However, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that the former may be more of a proof of concept or beta test for the latter, rather than an actual consumer product, despite the creator-focused marketing. Even if those talks go nowhere, though, I’d still like to see the company stick around, at the very least so everyone who ordered one gets it.


Sample Gallery

Please do not reproduce any of these images on a website or any newsletter/magazine without prior permission (see our copyright page). We make the originals available for private users to download to their own machines for personal examination or printing (in conjunction with this review); we do so in good faith, so please don’t abuse it.

A note on captions: I’ve shot with three major firmware versions while testing this camera, all of which have come with relatively fundamental changes to the image processing and/or shooting experience. Images taken with the original firmware have it noted in the caption, while images marked “Shot with Continuous Autofocus Update” were taken using the latest firmware available at time of writing, and include the updates to the image pipeline that came with the second version of firmware.

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About the Author: Mitchell started taking pictures at 10 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s been a wide-ranging adventure, spanning a wide variety of genres and locales, and occasionally dipping into fascinations with video and filmmaking. They honed their technical knowledge doing documentation, programing and QA, writing for The Verge, and just generally messing around on the computer to see what breaks.

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Polaroid’s silhouette tease tells us who its next product is for, but gives away little else

The company has been hard at work on advertising its products to people nostalgic for offline summers (and perhaps ones spent playing Pokémon).

A silhouette of a camera with a Pikachu tail, on a classic Pokemon-styled background.Polaroid

Polaroid is teasing something new coming tomorrow, posting a graphic on its social media page inspired by the hugely successful video game franchise Pokémon, implying that it could be some sort of collaboration. The post’s caption says “Something’s almost ready to show itself… revealed on August 18th.”

It’s always possible the company is riffing on a meme format to tease a completely new product, but if we had to guess, it seems more likely that it’ll be an existing product with a Pokémon theme. The silhouette in the image looks a lot like the existing Polaroid Go with a Pikachu tail, and we’ve seen instant cameras made to reference the franchise’s most recognizable character before. It’s also not out of the question that the announcement is about a co-branded film, rather than a camera; the company has done both, releasing cameras with Thrasher and MoMA liveries, and films with Pantone-colored frames.

Whatever it is, it’s more than likely it’ll be something camera-related. There was a time when the Polaroid name and logo appeared on a wide array of products that had very little to do with taking photos, from TVs to AA batteries, thanks to other companies licensing the brand. While this practice is still alive and well in the industry, it seems to be less common with Polaroid after it was purchased by the same person who owned the Impossible Project, leading to film and cameras once again being sold under the company’s name.

Recently, the company has been going after an audience tired of screens and phones, with its “the best summer is analog” campaign. The target audience clearly skews younger, the kind of people who would’ve grown up playing Pokémon games on their Nintendo DS or smartphone. So a collaboration between the two makes sense, tugging at people’s nostalgia for a time when the devices in their pocket were for having fun, rather than doomscrolling. Whatever it is, we won’t have to wait very long to see it fully unveiled.

About the Author: Mitchell started taking pictures at 10 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s been a wide-ranging adventure, spanning a wide variety of genres and locales, and occasionally dipping into fascinations with video and filmmaking. They honed their technical knowledge doing documentation, programing and QA, writing for The Verge, and just generally messing around on the computer to see what breaks.

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Google is still asking Fold buyers to compromise as its competitors are better than ever

The Pixel 11 Pro Fold has better cameras than its predecessor, but its system isn’t even on par with a phone that’s $1000 cheaper

A zoomed-in image of the Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold's camera bump.Google

Earlier this week, Google announced the Pixel 11 Pro Fold, the latest entry in its lineup of folding phones. While it includes some meaningful improvements over its predecessor, Google is still asking people to pay $1900 for a phone that makes a lot of compromises, at a time when its competitors have offerings that don’t ask you to give up much.

The issue is most evident when it comes to cameras. Despite its “Pro” branding, the Pixel 11 Pro Fold’s camera setup is more similar to that of the standard Pixel 11 – a phone that costs $1000 less – than the Pixel 11 Pro. It has the same Type 1/1.56 (48mm²) main sensor and the same Type 1/3.2 (15.5mm²) telephoto camera as the Pixel 11, and its ultrawide camera is actually fractionally smaller. So yes, even compared to the Pixel 11, the Fold’s cameras are technically worse, while the Pro’s array beats it in every way.

Compare this with Samsung’s latest Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra. Sure, it costs $200 more than Google’s foldable (though at these prices, that only amounts to an 11% premium), and its three cameras are the same as you’d find on the top-of-the-line Galaxy S26 Ultra. Now, the Z Fold 8 Ultra lacks the periscope camera you’d get on the candybar ultra, but for most shooting situations, its cameras are comparable to those on standard flagships like the iPhone 17 Pro or Google Pixel 11 Pro.

Google Pixel 11 Pro FoldPixel 11 Pro XLSamsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 UltraSamsung Galaxy Z Fold 8
Main camera24mm equiv. F1.7
Type 1/1.56 (48mm²)
48MP
24mm equiv. F1.68
Type 1/1.3 (72mm²)
50MP
24mm equiv. F1.7
Type 1/1.3 (72mm²)
200MP
23mm equiv. F1.8
Type 1/1.57 (50mm²)
50MP
Ultrawide camera9mm equiv. F2.2
Type 1/3.4 (13mm²)
10.5 MP
13mm equiv. F1.7
Type 1/2.51 (23.5mm²)
48MP
10mm equiv. F1.9
Type 1/2.5 (25mm²)
50MP 
10mm equiv. F1.9
Type 1/2.5 (25mm²)
50MP
Telephoto camera110mm equiv. F3.1
Type 1/3.2 (15.5mm²)
10.8MP
106mm equiv. F2.8
Type 1/1.95 (32mm²)
48MP
67mm equiv. F2.4
Type 1/3.94 (10mm²)
10MP
N/A
Inner / Outer screen size6.5″ / 8″– / 6.8″6.5″ / 8″5.5″ / 7.6″
Peak screen brightness3600 nit inner/outer3600 nit3000 nit inner/outer3000 nit inner/outer
Battery size4806mAh5115mAh5000mAh4800mAh
Thickness (folded / unfolded)10.1mm / 5mm8.4mm8.9mm / 4.1mm9.7mm / 4.5mm
Weight239g (8.4oz)226g (8oz)215g (7.6oz)201g (7.1oz)
Price$1900$1299$2100$1900

In fairness to Google, if you’re just comparing the cameras, the Pixel 11 Pro Fold comes out a bit ahead of Samsung’s price-competitive Galaxy Z Fold 8. That phone has a better ultrawide, but omits a telephoto option completely. However, it’s also a passport-style phone, adopting a form-factor that looks like it may be the future of foldables, if early reviews are any indication. When Samsung compromises on the cameras, you get something in return.

Still, you could potentially argue that Google is competing with Samsung on the camera front, as long as you ignore that the latter offers another model if you don’t prefer to compromise. But while cameras are obviously our primary concern here at DPReview, we recognize that most people’s phone purchasing decisions won’t hinge on the minutiae of sensor sizes (though if you’re spending almost $2000 on a phone, odds are you’re an enthusiast who wants the best whether you’ll use it to its fullest or not). Unfortunately for Google, the 11 Pro Fold is falling behind in other ways, too.

Two hands holding two folding phones. On the left is a tall, thin one, and on the right is a wider, shorter one.
This year, Samsung innovated on what form factors it offered for foldables, while Google continued with its single offering.
Samsung

The Pixel 11 Pro Fold has a few physical changes that are genuine improvements. It has slimmer bezels, is a touch thinner and lighter and is more durable. But when you open up that interior screen, you’ll still be greeted with a noticeable crease down the middle, something Samsung has all but eliminated in its latest foldables thanks to some clever engineering. The Korean giant is also starting to adopt silicon-carbon battery tech, letting it pack more energy density into the same space. I suspect these two factors will be big points in Samsung’s favor to the typical foldable buyer – the big screen you’re paying so dearly for will be nicer to look at and your phone will likely last longer on a charge – even if they don’t care about cameras.

There’s even more competition on the horizon

As if Samsung’s foldables weren’t enough of a threat to Google’s foldable ambitions, there’s even more competition on the horizon. Apple is expected to release its first foray into the form factor soon, likely with a passport-style phone. While I’d bet that its cameras won’t be anything special (if the iPhone Air is anything to go by), Apple undoubtedly has a way of exciting consumers about technologies that its competitors have long since adopted*. Google has brought a mild refresh with compromised cameras to a hype cycle fight.

What’s more, it’s really only Americans who will be choosing between the Pixel, Galaxy and iPhone. Outside of the US, there are even more options from companies like Oppo or Huawei, and while neither company has made one that uses the massive image sensors found in their main phones, that feels more like a matter of when, not if.

None of this is to say that I think the Pixel 11 Pro Fold will be bad. This is Google’s fourth folding phone, and it’s pretty good at making them by now. I’m sure the pictures it takes will be fine for most people, and that it’ll be good enough that the Google faithful will be happy to have it as an option. But with prices for foldables being higher than ever, and such fierce competition that promises to only get more intense in the coming months, I just don’t buy that good enough is good enough.

* – I’ll own up to the fact that this works on me, too. In 2024, I wrote an opinion piece about the Pixel 9 Pro Fold entitled “I don’t want to pay $1799 for worse photos.” And yet, hypocrite that I am, there’s a very high chance that I’ll buy the foldable iPhone, which may very well have worse cameras than my current iPhone 15 Pro. At the very least, it’ll almost certainly have fewer of them. The only thing saving me from being a complete liar is the fact that there’s no way Apple will charge $1800 for its foldable. I’ll consider myself lucky if it’s under $2000.

About the Author: Mitchell started taking pictures at 10 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s been a wide-ranging adventure, spanning a wide variety of genres and locales, and occasionally dipping into fascinations with video and filmmaking. They honed their technical knowledge doing documentation, programing and QA, writing for The Verge, and just generally messing around on the computer to see what breaks.

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