The first wave of this year’s big photo news is over with CES and some laggards, so this week our column is thinking a little outside the box. And even provides an addendum. Because last week we reported on the increasing lawsuits – mainly in the US – against images created by machine learning, aka AI, by photographers and artists. The lawyer Peter Hense brought that now on Twitter nicely to the point and described this as “the largest expropriation of authors in the history of mankind”. It can be left that way.
The enthusiasm for new technology can quickly turn into the opposite, not only with artificial intelligence, and RED now had to experience that too. Once a celebrated pioneer of affordable digital film cameras, the company has also received numerous patents on its road to success – and is now exploiting them mercilessly. At least that’s what Youtuber Theo, alias t3.gg, thinks, and his main channel reaches over 100,000 people.
RED trolls
His video entitled “Red destroys the camera industry” points to the fact that RED holds a patent for lossless compression of RAW videos. This function is actually indispensable for longer recordings and easier editing, especially when it comes to 4K videos. With less resolution you can at professional productions, such as for Netflix and Co. Except for Blackmagic, who developed their own process, almost every manufacturer has to purchase a license from RED in order to offer the function.
And there are no detours either. According to Theo, DJI recently had to disable the feature on its Ronin 4D camera – RED threatened to withdraw the existing license for the company’s drones. This leads to the bizarre situation that the cheap drones can now also record uncompressed RAW videos, but the Ronin 4D for around 6,500 euros cannot. RED has been suing rigorously, in the past against Sony, among others, and – we’ve finally come to cameras – against Nikon for almost a year now. Their Z9 masters the function, with a process that Nikon says it has developed itself. Consequently, Nikon has with a counterclaim reacted, which claimed, among other things, that the patent should not have been granted in the first place.
Courts have to decide
Such disputes usually end after many years in court with a settlement in which both sides make their technologies available to the other side, together with payments in one direction or the other. Until then, you probably don’t have to worry too much about an advertised feature suddenly disappearing. The DJI example just quoted represents a special situation. How long this can drag on is shown by the example of Rambus in the area of PC hardware.
Comet chase through cloud gaps
In the case of the Red-RAW, it will certainly not take 50,000 years – but that’s how long you have to wait to get the green comet C/2022 E3 in front of the lens again. It is now approaching Earth and will be closest to it on February 1, 2023. The first recordings are already available, also from German-speaking countries. If you haven’t photographed it yet, you can find detailed instructions on how to hunt comets here, including tips for post-processing. And while C/2022 comes fairly close to Earth, it doesn’t pose a threat. So there’s no need to put Bruce Willis in the shoot orbit.
Canon leads, Sony raises prices
But there was also a bit of hard photo news this week, for example that Canon again market leader is. At least in Japan, where the company was overtaken by Sony in terms of the number of mirrorless cameras in 2021. However, Sony continues to sell more lenses and compact cameras. However, the latter is a dying segment anyway. It should be noted that the figures come from the market research company BCN and are only intended to show around 40 percent of the market volume in Japan. For the time being, that only applies to Japan Sony raised prices, for almost all consumer devices, including cameras and lenses. The company speaks of an average of 14 percent, but this can vary greatly depending on the device.
New feature for Nikon’s D850
And of course hardly a week goes by without firmware updates for cameras. This time, Nikon started the compilers for the six-year-old D850 again and didn’t just fix bugs. with Firmware 1.30 the DSLR now masters a new color profile for portrait photography, which is available when shooting and filming. This affects skin tones in particular, which can be useful for internal processing in the camera, for example if you want to make pictures available quickly at weddings.
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