It’s clear that the most recent launches by Canon and Nikon are fighting more or less each other on a market of experts and pros. So, in the recent days, I collected a number of comparisons between the Nikon D800 and the Canon EOS 5D MkIII to help you check this out by yourself:

• Video shootout: Nikon D800 vs. Canon 5D mkIII by Dan Chung
• Canon EOS 5D Mark III vs Nikon D800 noise at CameraLabs
• Bob Atkins: Pixel Matters – Canon EOS 5D MkIII vs Nikon D800
• Canon EOS 5D Mark III: primeras muestras y breve comparativa con la Nikon D800 (de QueSabesDe.com)
• CrisisLab: The F%^&ing Nikon D800 vs. Canon 5D mkIII Shootout with a YouTube video

Of course, these will stay in the pages specific to these two cameras.

Thanks to PBS for this documentary about Ansel Adams, landscape star photographer.

Bryan O’Neil Hughes, Senior Product Manager at Adobe, gives us an idea of the next version of Adobe Camera Raw (ACR).

Leica has a long history and a brilliant fame for manufacturing excellent lenses. This is a marketing video about these Leica lenses.

Leica Lenses (English) from Leica camera on Vimeo.

Film or cards; Kodak or Lexar; Years apart, but the same attention to production quality.

Kudos to Dominik but do not take this too seriously, though.

Source: Dominik Wörner’s blog, via PetaPixel.

It disappeared quickly but I found it still available on a slightly more distant web site:

This is the Sony A77 indeed. Most probably, this is something coming straight from Sony. Possibly, as some others commented before, this is a scheduled leak part of the marketing campaign along with the official announcement in a few days (August 24th?) of both the Sony A77 and Sony A65.

All the features of the new Sony SLR cameras:

• Sony Alpha 65
• Sony Alpha 77

Timelapse – The City Limits from Dominic

http://www.dominicboudreault.com/

Mindrelic (another guy from RedBubble) spent a weekin Manhattan shooting time lapses of the city day and night.

Mindrelic – Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

http://www.mindrelic.com/

Aperture Revealed – 120 fps – HD from Camera Technica on Vimeo.

The same at a slower speed:

Aperture Revealed – 240 fps – HD from Camera Technica on Vimeo.

Thanks to Camera Technica for these videos.

1. Normal: Shutter pressed by the photographer’s digit
2. Remote shutter
3. Remote shutter and mirror lockup enabled

DSLR Mirror Vibration from Camera Technica on Vimeo.

Conclusion: Do like all the best landscape photographers obsessed with the finer details: Use a tripod, lock the mirror up before shooting and use a remote shutter (and beware of the wind, too).

Fragments from Nikon France on Vimeo.

A man lives a uneventful life until one day he begins receiving pieces of paper in his mail…
Shot with the Nikon D5100
A film by CHIVTEAM directed by Simon Bonneau and Charles-Edouard Dangelser.

See also http://hubblesite.org/gallery/behind_the_pictures/ where you can see the same video in very high quality.

However, I would strongly suggest that you would try this only if the camera is broken and it’s already out of warranty. The Nikon D7000 is a fragile piece of hardware equipment and after rebuilding it, you may still have to correctly recalibrate most of its sub-systems (including AF).

Source: Vimon Camera Service, camera repair in Thailand.

Thanks to PetaPixel.

CP+ Sony’s Booth – Sony Alpha Advance Model, Sony’s 2011 Camera Line-up and other Prototype. from SpacePigTV on Vimeo.

Source: AkihabaraNews.com

This was really a photography marvel in a time when video was not an integrated feature of photo cameras.

Cassandra C. Jones did a relatively similar job from horse images collected on the Internet (probably with Google as her accomplice).

Photography and space: Two adventures sharing one sense of passion.

Nikon has been going to space for years and they want us to know in this video.

Today, I’ve got a rather detailed talk with Édouard Schmitt, Sony France Alpha Product Manager, who helped me go over the current situation created by the announcement made by Sony a few days ago when they revealed that the digital sensor of the Alpha SLT-A33 and Alpha SLT-A55 could meet some over-heating issues (see our posts about it here).

As expected, he confirms us the information provided previously: The use of the video capture mode leads the digital sensor to heat up to the point where, after some time, the camera will decide to switch itself off (some kind of “thermal circuit breaker” kicking i, if you want).

What is more interesting is the overall presentation of the issue: “This is not a dysfunction of the sensor, but an auto-protection“. Furthermore, Édouard Schmitt went into the detail of the causes and confirms (and precises) the evaluations I could have provided here before:

• The image stabilization (which, for Sony as well as Pentax, operates by sensor displacement) produces some heat inside the camera,
• The sensor itself is a heat source –like any other electronic device– when it is used continuously like during video capture,
• The external temperature is also an important parameter in the equation (As a matter of fact, in the table provided here on the right, we see that the higher the external temperature, the shorter it takes for the sensor to overheat).

I noticed that sony insists heavily on the fact that image stabilization is a major factor here, from two different angles:

1. It has a primary impact (It’s true that the useful shoot time is (more than) doubled when not using SteadyShot)
2. This is the only solution offered by Sony; E.Schmitt excluded the possibility of a future firmware that could improve on the current status.

Nota bene: The observed maximum figure of 29 minutes comes from the normal recording limit of the camera as it is more or less forced upon us by fiscal regulation (a camera able to record longer sequences is heavily taxed in some countries and Sony decided like other manufacturers to stick to this limit for mere reasons of cost).

Up to this, the message is relatively simple but some important elements are added by Édouard Schmitt. First and foremost, the cooling down process is very fast and a few seconds only are needed to obtain a few more minutes of video capture (some real-life tests will obviously be needed to quantify such a statement, but it seems that the Sony user will not forced to watch the camera cool down indefinitely).

Then, and it should be checked and confirmed, “it’s not better elsewhere“. Understand: Sony’s competition has the same kind of issues but they do not communicate much on it. [Ed: I’m still wondering what is the influence of image stabilization here]

As a matter of fact, according to E.Schmitt, “90 or 95% of customers first buy a photo camera [and for them] a 3-, 4- or 5-minute take, it’s already long“. In fact, those who have a longer need are not in the consumer market anymore and the impact on the sames of the Alpha 33 and Alpha 55 will be minimal. It is even suggested that “in the future generations” the issue will be taken with a different kind of attention (Ed: Here I cannot stop thinking about a future, possible, probable, Alpha 77).

The last two subjects that we discussed were relatively lateral or complementary (but the YLovePhoto readers know that this has been discussed here in the past): LiveView mode and the NEX family of cameras. On the one hand, I could not obtain any statement on the effect on continuous display on the back LCD of the photo camera, other than a bland comment on “it’s rarely continuously used.”

For the NEX-3 and NEX-5, there is no trouble here. They are not impacted by the issue. First and foremost because their image stabilization is not obtained through sensor displacement, but by the action on an optical group inside the lens (thus, one of the causes mentioned above disappears). The smaller size of the body is also participating by providing a much better thermal exchange with the external air and allows to keep the internal temperature lower.

But there was a fly in the ointment. Only a few weeks after the official launch, we learned that the digital sensor is overheating. We know that the digital photo-video sensors produce heat whenever they are used. The design of sensors for video (and thus used more or less continuously) must take that into account to avoid heat production at all costs. The design of the cameras must take into account the need to move any heat left right out of the sensor area (possibly out of the camera).

Sony definitely missed one of these, indeed. The SLT-A33 and SLT-A55 are suffering from over-heating to the point that, when reaching a certain temperature, the camera switches itself off (It shuts the sensor down). As can be seen in the table here on the side, in the worst case (when it’s hot outside, 40°C, and that image stabilization is enabled), this is going to happen fast, real fast: 3 or 4 minutes only. Probably nearly everybody will admit that this is incompatible with the normal use of video capture in a normal way.

So, no video grabbing during Summer. More or less.

If you thought that this was bad enough, there is a hint to the possible addition, unconfirmed by Sony right now, of another limitation (maybe, within a longer time frame) respective to the use of the LiveView mode (which is only a low definition video mode).

The solutions? Let’s try to think them out:

• No firmware change will reduce the thermal dissipation of the sensor.
• No firmware change will improve the heat transfer through the body of the camera.
• A firmware change could remove (more or less completely) the thermal protection. But would it be a solution to risk some other problems? (early aging of the sensor, unacceptable thermal noise in the images, etc.)
• Modifying/replacing the sensor (supposing that Sony has a better or corrected sensor)? This is going to be a MAJOR repair operation.
• If the problem really comes from a bad design of the camera body, this is worse… Nothing left in the bag of solutions.

I let you imagine Sony’s dilemma. I let you imagine why the communication will be really tough next week…

While waiting for it, for those asking if they should buy a Sony SLT-A55 and thinking that they need the video capture, I say: Wait. For those who are in a hurry, I will not less than they must forget about video on the Alpha 33 and Alpha 55 for now. Video is nearly excluded in these cameras for the time being. The small sound you can hear is those competitors (Starting with Nikon and Canon) exhaling loudly (These cameras had given them cold sweats and they now feel that this could buy them some more time to react).