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Photo Blog

Some news from the site and from the digital photography world.

On March 21st, among general surprise, the very famous photography site DPreview announced that... in a short while it is closing after 25 years of operations.

Nobody expected this but current owner, Amazon, decided to shut down the most famous photo site on the web.

The content of DPreview should remain accessible for some time as an archive (for how long? nobody knows), but of course new gear will not be described and reviewed.

Which alternatives to DPReviews?

Well, it depends on your specific interest (forum to discuss with other photographers, reviews, tests, etc.) and your preferred language: on the web there are a lot of photography sites, though not comprehensive as DPReview has been for many photographers.

About searching cameras and lens models, LightPoint camera, lens and software database will continue to be updated with new models and links to the best reviews available on the web manually selected - you can find it in the Photography hub here

In order to have a quality audio recording shooting with a mirrorless (even a full-frame model), an external mic is a mandatory choice.

In this in-depth review (39 minutes of details and tests) we are going to analyze the stereo mic and digital recorder Zoom H5, one of the best-selling portable recorders.

LightPoint.info today launches a new information section: photo brands! In this section you will find the list of most of worldwide brands that produce photo gears (mainly cameras and lenses) or photo software.

Currently 48 brands are comprised and the list will grow; for each brand you will find some brief but interesting information: brand logo (proprietary of the company), headquarter location, year of foundation, and for the most famous ones a brief history and the description of abbreviations used in products like terms in lens naming. Also in each brand page you will find the links to product models of that brand in LightPoint photo gear database.

In the past months, we've seen worrying signals coming from Nikon, that let us think of internal problems.

Warranties have been reduced, no new models, many product discontinued...

Let's summarize what happened recently to let the fact speak:

Referenced brands in this article: Nikon

Benq produces very good monitors for photography, with professional quality but cheaper than other pro brands like NEC and Eizo. And if you buy a high end Benq monitor with hardware calibration, like the great SW271 that is a 27" 4K monitor with almost 100% AdobeRGB gamut, you surely care a lot for color accuracy, so periodic monitor calibration with a colorimeter is a must.

Benq provides its software for hardware calibration: Palette Master Elements (PME). I made myself a lot of testing on color accuracy resulting from using this software and found one particular problem with it.

Today a new interesting LightPoint tutorial on Color Theory has been published! All important concepts are explained in a simple manner, to understand what are colors, color spaces, ICC profiles, gamma correction, which is the difference between sRGB and Adobe RGB, and so on.

It's very useful to get familiar with some tech word in the photography world including monitors.

 Available in the "Tutorial" section at this link.

Olympus logo

Today very sad, but not so unexpected news, come from Olympus: the company has signed an agreement with Japan Industrial Partners, Inc. ("JIP") to sell its imaging division, the one that produces and sells cameras and lenses, by the end of current year.

Referenced brands in this article: Olympus
PhotoWhisker logo

Do you often export massively your RAW images into JPEG or intermediate TIF for post-processing in Photoshop before final export to JPG? Not all your images have the same importance and you would like to save space on your storage since image files are so many and so big?

You can improve your export workflow with the new Adobe Lightroom@ Classic plugin

PhotoWhisker

Let's see how:

Darktable logo

As in the tradition in the last years, on the Christmas Eve a new major upgrade to open source free software DarkTable is released and this time to version 3.0. It's a feature-rich software for RAW development providing also a media catalogue, so it's interesting to give it a try.

It can be installed on Windows, Mac and also Linux (not like the famous Lightroom from Adobe and Capture One from Phase One).

You can find the main news of this release and the link to official page with all the details in our photographic software databaseDarkTable specifications.

aspect of Tamron 17-28 and Batis 18

Are you looking for a high quality and fast wide angle in the 16-20mm focal range for your full frame Sony camera (A7 or A9 series)? 

The Tamron 17-28 mm f2.8 and the Batis 18mm f2.8 are two excellent choices, respectively at about 1000 €/$ and 1300 €/$.