Canon has released firmware updates for its vlogging-focused EOS R6 V, and its enthusiast mirrorless hybrid EOS R6 III, adding some new features and quality-of-life improvements.

The EOS R6 V gets the heftiest update, adding the ability to shoot flash with the camera, which the company promised at launch. This comes with a new menu that allows you to adjust your settings when using a flash, though it’s still a relatively limited implementation. To start, the camera is still primarily designed for video, so it doesn’t have any sort of mechanical shutter. This means you can only use flash at up to 1/60 sec, which will be a big limitation if you’re shooting outdoors. The camera also doesn’t have any of the traditional pins on its hotshoe, meaning your limited to flashes that work with the digital mutli-function shoe, unless you happen to have an adapter. (Sorry, fans of the Godox iT32.)

Still, it’s nice to see Canon following through on its plan to add flash support to the EOS R6 V for the niche situations where it’ll be useful. The V1.10 firmware also adds support for the BR-E2 wireless remote that Canon announced alongside the camera, allows the gridline overlay to display on the live view screen while you’re recording video and fixes several bugs.

The list of updates for the EOS R6 III, which, as the names imply, features very similar hardware to the EOS R6 V, is unsurprisingly similar. It too gains support for the BR-E2 and grid lines while recording, and receives several bug fixes. It also gains a feature introduced by EOS R6 V: the ability to use the AF for close-up demos setting across video modes. This feature overrides the camera’s facial recognition system if it detects that you’re holding something up to show the camera, and was previously only available in a specific mode that took away most of your manual exposure, focus and audio controls. Now, you can use it while retaining control over the rest of your image, making it much more flexible.

While it’s a relatively small feature, it’s also not always a given that manufacturers will bring features from their newer cameras to their older ones, even if it seems that they should support them. While the EOS R6 III hasn’t received all of the EOS R6 V’s video tricks, it’s nice to see that one of the camera’s quality-of-life improvements isn’t exclusive to people who aren’t as interested in photography.

The firmware updates for the EOS R6 V and EOS R6 III are available for free from Canon’s website.

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This is the first of several guides intended to help you navigate the new website and forums. We want you to be able to quickly locate items you’re used to using, and perhaps discover an interesting new feature or two along the way. We will highlight items in both desktop and mobile views if there is enough distinction between them.

Who is this guide for

• By the end, you’ll know how to control notifications for email and on-site activity
• You’ll be able to directly set “Watch” preferences on discussions and article comments
• You’ll know what to change if you’re receiving too many notifications

For this first guide, let’s talk about receiving those important activity notifications. Take a look at the top right of the website, you’ll notice a flag icon and a message bubble icon. These are your activity and direct messages received notifications, respectively:

Notification icons

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If there are unread notifications, the red-circled number will appear. Clicking an icon will display a summary of those notifications.

We are aware that there are still some display differences between viewing this space on the main website vs. from the forums, such as notifications being completely cleared only in the main website dropdown. Let us know if this guide doesn’t track with what you are seeing.

To the left of those icons, you’ll see your profile icon. If you are in desktop view, you will also see your account name. Clicking your profile image will open a list of settings. This guide is about notifications, so for today, let’s click on the ‘Forum settings’ option:

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Profile and forum notification settings

The forum settings link takes you to a detailed list of options to customize your forum experience. Near the top, you have several ways to be notified of messages via email. From there, you can set global notifications that will automatically inform you of updates to your created content. The forum system recognizes this action as a “Watch” (aka, “Follow” for the content you are interested in tracking):

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Mobile users: Ensure push notifications are enabled on your phone. You may also need to click the ‘Enable push notifications’ button in the current forum options page you are in, before seeing the following options:

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Scrolling down a bit further (you can skip past several of the other options for now), you’ll come to ‘Settings by notification category: When someone…’ section.

If you do not see this section, keep scrolling (it’s a long list). Please check:

• Rotate your phone from portrait to landscape view.
• May be blocked if you’re using a business phone and it’s company-controlled.

Otherwise, please log in on a desktop device for now to adjust these settings:

DPReview

There are three checkboxes available for each item, depending on how you want to receive notifications for that item.

1. Alert: Shows a number indicator on the icons at the top of the page for new unread alerts or messages
2. Pop-up Auto-read: Displays a small pop-up window that sets any unread notices to have automatically been read upon that window popping up.
3. Push: Functions just like mobile push notifications, sending alerts directly to your device

The forum system manages notifications across the site, from front-page articles to forum activity. It is designed to give you granular control over what you’re notified about in articles, including responses to your article comments.

Using Watch and Unwatch settings on discussions

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Moving out of the profile settings options, the above image shows a discussion thread as viewed at the top of the thread. Clicking ‘Watch’ will set your account to receive notifications when someone posts in that thread, even if you are not contributing to that thread.

What’s the difference between this watch option and those profile settings from earlier?

• Profile settings dictate the baseline for how you receive notifications. You will use this when you want to be notified of a response whenever you, say, reply to a forum thread.
• The ‘Watch’ setting is a manual option that lets you receive specific updates for a particular thread, regardless of whether you’re actively participating in it or not. 

Receiving too many notifications

Your profile settings also have an automatic watch option for threads that you start. It’s one of the easiest ways to stay connected to a conversation without having to manually check whether someone has replied. If you feel that you are receiving too many notifications and are not sure where they are coming from, you may need to:

• Unwatch threads you no longer want to follow (click the same button, “Watch”, you initially used to watch the thread, which will now read “Unwatch”)
• Check your profile settings to ensure that automatically enabled settings are disabled
• Reduce e-mail notifications and rely more on on-site alerts

Personally, I use on-site alerts for most things and reserve email for threads I want to follow more closely. But this is very much a “set it how you like” system.

Try adjusting a notification setting today

Even if everything is working great for you right now, try using the Watch feature on a discussion you’re interested in to explore the many options available. 

If you have any concerns with the notifications system after reviewing these settings, please let us know in the comments below. Also let us know in the comments what other guides we should introduce.

We hope this guide helped your DPReview reading experience!

There’s no shortage of content out there about Kodak’s rise and fall, but this deep dive from Design Docs takes a slower, more granular approach to the story behind the company. The feature-length documentary dives into Kodak’s rise, dominance and collapse, and how a lab engineer’s toaster-sized prototype set the company’s eventual downfall in motion.

The video walks through George Eastman’s early years and the business decisions that turned Kodak into a near-monopoly, from roll film and the Brownie to the marketing machine that embedded “Kodak moments” into everyday language. It also spends plenty of time on the culture around Rochester, including an interesting look at how Eastman took care of his employees and supported the community – in Rochester, New York and beyond – in ways that were well ahead of their time.

Of course, the story wouldn’t be complete without touching on what happened to Kodak with the rise of the digital age, and the documentary also covers that. It digs into the internal politics around Kodak’s invention of the digital camera, the fear of cannibalizing film and the decisions that eventually pushed the company toward bankruptcy. At just under an hour, it’s on the longer and slower side for YouTube, but if you’re willing to settle in, you’ll get a level of detail that most Kodak documentaries skip.

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In June, Flic Film, a Canadian manufacturer and distributor of analog photography goods, posted on social media that it had released “an all-new film stock.” While that’s certainly exciting on the surface, the announcement sparked a flurry of questions and speculation, with a bit of contention.

Flic Film isn’t alone in this situation either. There has been an increase in supposedly new film stocks in the last few years, but inevitably, the comments are full of discussion about what the film really is. There also seems to be frustration floating around about how all film stocks these days are the same, and that brands are essentially misleading us into thinking we have options. But all of that oversimplifies what’s really going on.

What’s going on with film these days?

Abby Ferguson

If you aren’t closely involved in the photographic film world, some context will help you understand why that post (and similar ones by other brands) ruffled some feathers. At the time of writing, there are only three to four facilities producing color film at a commercial scale. A handful of additional producers are making black and white films.

Despite the limited producers, there seems to be no shortage of film brands. Depending on your location, you can buy film branded by the likes of Lomography, Flic Film, Reto, CineStill, Candido, Japan Camera Hunter, Rollei, Leica and so many more. Even my local film lab has its “own” stock. This is where the confusion stems from. Each of these brands isn’t making their own film from scratch, given the resources and equipment required, so what’s going on?

There are a few things at play here. Some companies are simply repackaging (sometimes referred to as respooling) film. They buy it in bulk from a manufacturer, load it into canisters and boxes with their own label, make no changes to the film itself and sell it as their own.

At times, brands are upfront about this. For example, Flic Film sells Elektra 100, which its website has clearly labeled as re-spooled Kodak Aerocolor IV color negative film. Flic Film named the film something else, but it is upfront about what the film actually is. That’s not always the case, though, and there are certainly instances of repackaged film that don’t have the actual stock disclosed.

It goes beyond repackaging

Abby Ferguson

Another fairly common occurrence is a brand having an existing film stock modified for its use. CineStill is a good example of this, as it takes Kodak’s motion picture stocks and removes the remjet layer for its 800T and 50D films. Other brands also take motion picture stock and modify it in similar ways, so that it’s more easily processed by the general consumer and the labs they take film to.

Modification isn’t only happening on motion picture film, either. Still picture film is also modified in multiple ways in order to create a different look from the base stock. Manufacturers can do things like pre-flashing, which exposes film to a small amount of light to reduce contrast and compress the tonal range, or they can change the backing to alter how light interacts with the emulsion. They can also treat the film in various ways to push the effective ISO higher, add sensitizing dyes to shift spectral sensitivity or add additional coatings.

All that to say that there are quite a few options for altering a film stock that will result in a fairly substantial change in look. Some of these changes happen at the source by the original manufacturer, others are made by the brand in its own facilities. The changes can completely alter the colors you get from a film, its sensitivity to light, its contrast and its grain character, giving it a distinctive look.

Why don’t brands just say what it is?

With that context in mind, let’s look back at what happened with Flic Film’s latest release. When Flic Film posted about its new product, it said explicitly that it is “an all-new film stock.” Given that it seemed highly unlikely that Flic Film managed to establish its own film production facility, or even that they developed something new from the ground up that’s produced at an existing facility, people were upset about the claim that it’s “all-new.”

Flic Film subsequently released a video addressing the questions and complaints. In the video, a representative for Flic Film says, “The only answer I can honestly give is I don’t know.” He goes on to explain that they of course know the manufacturer, but when they receive the film, they get it as a number, not with the original name noted, so they truly don’t know what the stock was originally.

He also explains that when they put out a new film, they buy a master roll from a manufacturer, but that things don’t stop there. “The manufacturers don’t just grab something off the shelf and sell it to us. They actually do little tweaks to that film to make it individual to us,” he says. “They’re not going to sell us their best-selling film straight up and have us just replicate it, that makes no sense and it’s no good for the customers.”

But even when modifications are subtle, or a film is simply respooled, not sharing the name of the original film isn’t inherently nefarious. As Flic Film’s video explained, it’s very possible the brand doesn’t even know what the original stock is.

Abby Ferguson

Non-disclosure agreements (NDA) are another common practice in this industry. When working with a manufacturer, a film company may have to sign an NDA that prevents them from sharing the manufacturer’s name, the original stock name or both. In the case of CineStill, while it’s a poorly kept secret that it uses certain Kodak motion picture film, it’s never listed outright in CineStill’s marketing. In fact, its FAQ page says, “out of respect for our unique relationships with our suppliers, we are careful not to openly claim and benefit from the goodwill and reputation of the brands and trademarks of the original products.”

CineStill is considered one of the more transparent brands, but just because other companies aren’t sharing as much doesn’t necessarily mean that they are intentionally being deceitful. They could have more strict agreements in place with producers, or other factors could be at play. It certainly would be nice to have greater transparency, and I firmly believe brands should disclose information when they are able to. But it isn’t always a sign of a company trying to scam us out of our money if they aren’t upfront.

Modified film is still legitimate

Abby Ferguson

Transparency is one thing, but the other frustration I see coming out of recent film launches is rhetoric that all film stocks are the same these days and choice is an illusion sold to us by all of these companies. In the case of simply respooled film, yes, that is absolutely true. But, producers and brands can create quite distinct looks by modifying stocks. If a film looks different than what it came from, it seems reasonable to call it a new film.

Something similar happens in the digital camera world, too. Camera manufacturers source sensors, EVFs, displays and more from a handful of suppliers, yet it’s silly to argue that all cameras are the same as a result. Each camera manufacturer has to make additional decisions in terms of processing, colors, ergonomics and UI. What matters is what a company does with those common components.

We are quite far from the 1990s heyday when you could walk into a store and see a colorful wall of different film stocks. But a recent resurgence has led to more film brands working with producers in new ways, giving photographers more options than they had just five years ago. More options mean more people finding a film they love, and more people shooting film is only a good thing for the medium, which is always worth celebrating in my book.

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