Archive

01Still Making Them

01.1The Body That Shipped in 2021A new DSLR arrived the year Canon and Nikon declared the mirror era over. Here is what Ricoh put in it, and why.
01.2A Sensor With the Colour Filter Array Taken OffThe K-3 III Monochrome is not a black-and-white mode or a software conversion. It is the K-3 III's APS-C sensor with its Bayer mosaic physically absent — a deliberate subtraction that changes what every photosite does.
01.3The Full-Frame Body That Tracks Stars from the SensorA single GPS coordinate, fed into an existing stabilisation mechanism, turns a still camera into a slow-motion tracking mount.
01.4Where the KF Sits and What It DropsThe KF is a K-mount body without weather sealing and with an articulating screen — two decisions that define its place in the line.
01.5Ninety-Five Seals Is a Number, Not a PromiseRicoh publishes a seal count; it does not publish a test standard. Those are different things.
01.645.46 Millimetres — Every Pentax Since 1975One fixed number has governed half a century of lens and body compatibility across the entire K-mount line.
01.7A Lens Roadmap for a Mount Nobody Else SupportsWhen the maker is the only party on the roadmap, the roadmap tells you everything about what that maker actually believes.

02Everyone Else

02.1Four Mounts That Replaced the Mirror, and None of Them AgreeWhen Canon, Nikon and Sony abandoned their legacy mounts within a few years of each other, the engineering choices they made guaranteed permanent incompatibility.
02.2What Each of Them Threw Away to Get Closer to the SensorA shorter flange distance unlocked optical flexibility and, for three of the four brands, ended a mount that had served for decades.
02.3Nearly Every Camera in This Article Shares a Sensor DivisionSony Semiconductor Solutions supplies image sensors to Nikon, Fujifilm and Ricoh, so a competitor underpins rivals' cameras. Canon makes its own.
02.4The Queue for the X100VI and What GFX Is ForOne company, two strategies: Fujifilm is selling a fixed-lens APS-C camera that nobody can find and a medium-format system that almost nobody needs.
02.5The Brand That Survived the CompanyWhen Olympus exited imaging in 2021, the camera division did not close — it changed hands.
02.6Three Companies, One Mount, No Common SensorA mount agreement made the lenses interchangeable. It did not make the cameras alike.

03Six Million

03.1The Mirror Was a Footnote in a Shrinking CategoryDSLR versus mirrorless is an engineering argument. CIPA's shipment data frames a different one.
03.2Fewer Bodies, Higher Prices — the CIPA Numbers Since 2016Shipment volumes have fallen by more than half since the mid-2010s. Average selling prices have nearly doubled over the same span. Those two facts are not a contradiction.
03.3The Compact Died, Then Something Strange HappenedCIPA data declared the category finished. The numbers were right — and then a different set of numbers arrived.
03.4The Bodies Nobody Makes Any More Are the Ones on the ShelfMap Camera's used-body rankings show discontinued DSLRs dominating secondary sales — which tells you something about the installed base.
03.5The Lens Numbers Tell a Different StoryInterchangeable-lens shipments and body shipments have not moved in lockstep since the mirrorless pivot — and the gap is the signal worth watching.

04Inside The Box

04.1What the Sensor Specification Sheet Does Not Say Out LoudSensor numbers are geometry. The specification sheet reports the results of physical constraints without naming them.
04.2Three Ways to Turn Light Into NumbersMost camera sensors see the world through a compromise. The choice of which compromise to accept is baked into the silicon before the shutter is ever fired.
04.3Why the Mirror Was Good at One Thing
04.4Shake Reduction and Star Tracking Are Not the Same Mechanism
04.5The Problem Sony Spent a Decade SolvingRolling shutter is not a glitch — it is a consequence of how sensors read out. Sony's a9 III is the first full-frame camera to eliminate it at the source.
04.6Every Maker's RAW Is a Different File, and Adobe Has OpinionsThe format war nobody voted for: five proprietary containers, one open standard, and a long argument about who owns your archive.
04.7Why Adapters Work — and When They CannotOne measurement is the complete explanation for an entire product category.

05Film Again

05.1A New Film Camera, and It Only Uses Half of Each FrameRicoh released a mass-market film camera in 2024. Its most consequential specification is the one it subtracts.
05.2The Rochester Coating Line That Kept RunningA coating operation declared dead more than a decade ago is still running, still shipping, and still formulating emulsions in the city that invented mass-market photography.
05.3Harman's Phoenix and What a New Emulsion Costs to LaunchThe first new colour film from a UK manufacturer in decades arrived in 2023 — and the engineering behind it explains why it took so long.
05.4Ilford's Supply Chain Outlasted the Digital DisruptionThe coating line in Mobberley kept running. The volume going through it is higher now than it was ten years ago.
05.5The Darkroom Moved to the Kitchen SinkHome film developing has gone from specialist pursuit to documented consumer trend — the chemistry suppliers and equipment makers are the evidence.
05.6The Scanner Shortage Nobody Fixed