Weekly News Roundup
A compact prime from Panasonic, a limited edition Canon that nobody can find, and DaVinci Resolve is coming for Lightroom.
This week in photography: Panasonic announces a compact 40mm prime, Canon's anniversary G7 X arrives, DaVinci Resolve takes on Lightroom, NASA releases new Artemis II images, the L-Mount Alliance grows, and DxO updates Nik Collection 9.
Panasonic Announces the Lumix S 40mm f/2
Panasonic officially announced the Lumix S 40mm f/2 compact prime lens for L-mount at NAB this week and the price is worth leading with. Four hundred dollars. For a full frame autofocus prime from a first party L-mount manufacturer that is genuinely competitive and worth paying attention to.
The 40mm focal length sits in an interesting gap in most full frame systems. It is slightly longer than the wide street lenses most photographers default to and slightly shorter than a traditional 50mm. On a full frame body it gives you a natural perspective that feels intimate without being tight. For street and travel photographers who want something compact and fast without going all the way to a 35mm or committing to the more formal look of a 50mm this sits in a sweet spot that not many lenses occupy.
The lens is compact by full frame prime standards which matters if you are shooting with a Leica SL, a Panasonic S body, or a Sigma fp and you do not want the camera and lens combination to become something you hesitate to carry. At $400 it is one of the more accessible full frame primes currently available for any mount. Worth a close look if you shoot L-mount.
Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark III 30th Anniversary Edition Arrives Monday
Canon is celebrating 30 years of the PowerShot line with a limited edition version of the G7 X Mark III that lands in US stores on April 28. The camera is functionally identical to the standard model that Canon released back in 2019. Same 20 megapixel one inch stacked sensor. Same 24 to 100mm f/1.8 to 2.8 equivalent zoom. Same DIGIC 8 processor. What you are paying for is a distinctive graphite finish, diamond knurled front ring, and 30th anniversary branding on the body. It ships with a limited edition Peak Design Cuff wrist strap and a 32GB SD card.
The price is $1,299 which is $419 over the standard model's MSRP. That is a significant premium for what is essentially a cosmetic update to a seven year old camera. Canon is being transparent about this and not pretending otherwise. The anniversary edition is for people who want the collector object as much as the camera.
What makes this story interesting is what is happening around it. The camera is already being scalped in Australia before it has officially launched there. B&H is running a waitlist system. Adorama is selling it in person only at its New York store. Midwest Photo is using a lottery. The level of demand for a graphite version of a 2019 compact camera tells you something real about where the market is right now. The compact camera revival is not slowing down and the G7 X Mark III in particular has developed a following that goes well beyond what Canon probably expected when the camera was first released.
DaVinci Resolve 21 Is Coming for Lightroom
This is the story from NAB that photographers should pay the most attention to. Blackmagic Design confirmed at the show that DaVinci Resolve 21 will include a dedicated photo editing page. This positions the professional color grading and video editing software as a direct competitor to Adobe Lightroom for still image work.
Resolve already has color grading tools that are widely considered best in class for video work. A dedicated photo editing workflow built on those same tools could be genuinely powerful. The color science in Resolve is exceptional and if Blackmagic brings that same capability to raw photo processing the results could be very good.
The part worth highlighting for photographers who have been frustrated with Adobe's subscription model is this. DaVinci Resolve has a free version. A fully capable, no cost alternative to Lightroom would be a significant development for the photography community and Blackmagic has a track record of putting serious tools into the free tier of Resolve.
Full details on what the photo editing page actually includes are still emerging. We will have more to report as hands on coverage from NAB develops over the coming days. But if you have been looking for a reason to explore Resolve this might end up being it.
NASA Releases Previously Unseen Artemis II Earth Day Photographs
To mark Earth Day on April 22 NASA released a series of photographs of Earth taken by the Artemis II crew that had not been seen publicly before. The images were made during the crew's historic voyage to the far side of the Moon earlier this month and show the planet from a distance and perspective that very few photographs ever have.
We covered the Artemis II mission and its photography in last week's roundup. The Earth Day release adds to an already extraordinary body of images from the mission. All of them are freely available on NASA's website and they are worth looking at properly rather than in a social media feed. Pull them up full screen. The scale of what you are looking at takes a moment to register and it is worth giving it that moment.
The L-Mount Alliance Gains Another New Member
The L-Mount Alliance, the partnership between Leica, Panasonic, and Sigma that governs the L-mount lens standard, has gained another new member. The specific company and product details are still emerging from NAB coverage but the addition continues a pattern of gradual expansion that is making the L-mount ecosystem increasingly competitive.
For photographers considering an L-mount system the growing Alliance membership matters practically. More manufacturers building L-mount lenses means more options at more price points. The ecosystem that was once limited primarily to Leica, Panasonic, and Sigma glass now includes a growing number of third party options and that trend is moving in a useful direction for anyone shooting with an L-mount body.
DxO Announces Nik Collection 9
DxO has released Nik Collection 9, the latest version of the plugin suite that works alongside Lightroom and Capture One. The update adds 833 new camera and lens profiles, bringing the total number of supported combinations to a very large number, and introduces more advanced masking tools across the collection.
For photographers who use Nik Collection plugins as part of their editing workflow this is a straightforward update worth installing. The additional camera and lens profiles matter most if you shoot with recently released hardware that previous versions of the collection did not fully support. The masking improvements are more universally useful and are worth exploring if you have not looked at the Nik tools recently. Silver Efex Pro in particular remains one of the strongest black and white conversion tools available for any editing software and the updated version is worth spending some time with.
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