News While I Was Offline

Nikon introduced the 135mm f/1.8 S Plena lens, a fast telephoto lens.
DxOMark labelled the 85mm f/1.2 S as having the highest score of any lens they’ve tested. This, of course, got a lot of friendly replication on the Internet. Personally, I’m not a fan of DxOMark’s overall scores, as they’re hidden behind unclear subjective evaluation. Things that DxOMark does well is to perform objective tests that are replicable. One such thing that didn’t get enough play in the on-going discussion was this: DxOMark measured the 85mm f/1.2 S as t/1.3, which I can confirm (the Canon 85mm f/1.2 EF lens is t/1.6, by comparison). CIPA marketing allows for rounding of both focal lengths and apertures, and this results in a lot of misleading specs, including just how fast a lens is. Both Nikon 85mm’s are relatively close to their stated aperture in actual light transmission. All that said, the 85mm f/1.2 S is a pretty amazing lens, as I’ll be reporting in my upcoming review of it.
TTArtisan introduced the 500mm f/6.3 manual focus lens for the Z mount.
Laowa announced a 10-50x macro lens that provides microscope-like magnification with a fixed 20mm working distance.
The Z9 software was updated to version 4.10, with the primary changes being the addition of bird recognition and airplane recognition. By separating birds from animals, this apparently helps the discrimination against busy backgrounds.
Nikon officials have said that no new Road Map will be published after the 35mm f/1.2 lens appears, so I've taken the road map article off the site.

Oct 4, 2023

Thom Hogan

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News While I Was Offline