Weekly News Roundup
Sony pulls its memory cards, DNG gets official, and Annie Leibovitz shows up at soccer practice.
A big week. Sony has effectively shut down its memory card business due to the flash shortage, DNG is now an international standard, and Annie Leibovitz was photographing soccer players in Atlanta. Here is everything worth knowing.
Sony Halts Nearly Its Entire Memory Card Business
This is the biggest story in photography this week and it affects every photographer who shoots Sony or relies on CFexpress and SD cards for their workflow.
Effective March 27, Sony suspended orders for almost its entire lineup of memory cards in Japan, including all CFexpress Type A and Type B cards and virtually every SD card in its lineup. The reason is the global flash memory shortage. AI data centers are consuming NAND flash at a scale that is leaving consumer and professional imaging products fighting over whatever is left. Sony is the first major camera media manufacturer to pull its products from the market entirely rather than simply raising prices, which suggests the supply situation is worse than most people realized. No timeline for resumption has been given.
The practical implications are real. Sony's CFexpress Type A cards are the required media for several Sony camera bodies including the Alpha 1, Alpha 7S III, and FX3. Photographers relying on these cameras for professional work need to find stock now before retail inventory dries up. Third party options from Angelbird, ProGrade Digital, and Wise Advanced remain available for now but the same underlying shortage affects all manufacturers.
This is also worth connecting to something we covered recently. The backup post we ran a few weeks ago talked about the importance of protecting your images. The memory crisis is a reminder that the infrastructure we take for granted around photography, the cards, the drives, the storage, is more fragile than it looks. Plan accordingly.
DNG Is Now Officially an International Standard
This one has been a long time coming. After more than 20 years of effort, Adobe's DNG format has been officially recognized as ISO standard 12234-4, placing it alongside formats like TIFF and PDF as a documented, openly licensed international standard for camera raw files.
For photographers who care about the long term accessibility of their images this matters. Proprietary raw formats are a genuine archival risk. If a manufacturer stops supporting a format or goes out of business, files in that format become increasingly difficult to open over time. DNG as an open standard removes that risk entirely. The format is fully documented, openly licensed, and now internationally recognized. Anyone can implement it.
For those of us already shooting with cameras that output DNG natively, Leica, Ricoh, Sigma, and DJI among them, this changes nothing in practice. For everyone else it is a strong argument for converting proprietary raw files to DNG on ingest, something Lightroom and Capture One both support. Your images from twenty years ago should still be accessible twenty years from now. DNG being an ISO standard makes that significantly more likely.
Annie Leibovitz Photographs the US Men's National Soccer Team
Annie Leibovitz was spotted at the USMNT training camp in Atlanta last week, photographing four players for an hour at the team's practice facility. Six other players were simultaneously being shot for Vogue on an adjacent field. The outlet commissioning Leibovitz's specific shoot has not been disclosed.
The US is co-hosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the cultural moment around it is building quickly. Having the most famous portrait photographer in the world show up at training camp tells you something about how seriously the sport is being taken as a cultural phenomenon in America right now.
Worth noting from a photography perspective: Leibovitz at 76 is still working at the highest level of the profession, still being commissioned by major publications, still turning up on grass fields in Georgia to photograph athletes. There is something in that worth sitting with. The work does not stop.
Thypoch Teases Its First Ever Autofocus Lens
Thypoch has been known exclusively for beautifully made manual focus prime lenses. Their Simera 28mm and 35mm f/1.4 lenses in particular developed a strong following among Leica and Sony shooters who wanted character-driven optics at a reasonable price.
This week they teased their first ever autofocus lens, a 24-50mm f/2.8 zoom. This is a significant departure from everything the brand has done before. A mid-range zoom with autofocus is a completely different product category from a manual focus prime, aimed at a completely different kind of shooter.
The Chinese lens market has been one of the most interesting stories in photography over the past few years and Thypoch moving into autofocus zoom territory is another data point in that story. No pricing or release date has been announced yet but it is worth watching.
OM System Hints at the Return of the PEN Camera
Separate from the ownership story that broke this week, OM System executives have been unusually candid about their plans to revive the PEN camera lineup. At CP+ last month the company stopped short of making any formal announcement but the enthusiasm in the room was hard to miss.
The original Olympus PEN-F, released in 2016, remains one of the most beautiful digital cameras ever made. A compact, classically styled body with a tilting screen, in-body stabilization, and a 20 megapixel sensor. It was discontinued in 2020 and has been missed ever since. If OM System is genuinely working on a modern successor it would be significant news for street photographers, travel photographers, and anyone who values a camera that is a pleasure to carry and use.
Nothing is confirmed. But the signals are strong enough to be worth paying attention to.
Nikon Releases Firmware for the Zf and Z9
A quick one for Nikon shooters. Firmware version 2.01 for the Zf and 5.32 for the Z9 are now available. Both updates address the same issue, a bug where the cameras were not correctly locking in the current aperture setting when powering down into sleep mode. If you shoot either body head to Nikon's website and update.
Fujifilm X Half Gets a Price Drop
The Fujifilm X Half, the digital half-frame camera that generated significant excitement on launch, appears to have received a lower list price at several retailers in the US and UK including Fujifilm's own stores. The X Half shoots vertically oriented images at half the normal frame size, producing a distinctive look that splits neatly into diptychs. It was a genuinely original idea when it launched and a lower price makes it more accessible to photographers curious about what the format can do.
GoPro Is About to Do Something Interesting
Reports have confirmed that GoPro will debut cameras with significantly larger sensors in April, with the company describing the upcoming release as having bulletproof reliability. GoPro has always prioritized ruggedness and convenience over image quality. A larger sensor changes that equation meaningfully.
For photographers and filmmakers who work in challenging environments, a weather-sealed, durable camera with a sensor capable of producing genuinely high quality images in low light would fill a real gap in the market. We do not yet know exactly what GoPro is announcing but April should tell us. Worth watching.
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