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Pentax updates its K mount lens roadmap but there’s nothing new on it

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Pentax has updated its K mount lens roadmap as of November 2022. This sounds like it should be a good thing, although it’s really not. No new lenses have been added to the roadmap, not even mysterious ones with vague titles that don’t actually give anything away. Sure, there are a couple of those on there, but they were already on there in the last roadmap update.

Given recent reports of Ricoh dumping less profitable sections of its business, this does not bode well for the future of Pentax. If their own engineers don’t have anything new to report, then it could be because they’ve been told not to work on anything new. There are two updated roadmaps, with one showing every Pentax lens and one showing only full-frame lenses.

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Leica store in San Francisco robbed with $178,000 worth of gear stolen

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An armed robbery recently occurred in San Francisco, the city that keeps earning a bad rep for camera thefts. Four masked thieves burst into a Leica store near Union Square. While holding the employees at gunpoint, they stole $178,000 worth of gear and fled the scene only a few minutes later.

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Midwest Photo robbed again as a truck crashes into the store

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A few days ago, Columbus-based business Midwest Photo got robbed in a quite dramatic manner. A truck, which was reportedly stolen, crashed into the store smashing everything in its way. A man can be seen in the surveillance video rushing out of the truck with a large white bag. The store was robbed, and it sadly wasn’t the first time.

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This wooden lens was built using the guts of a Super-Takumar 55mm f/2 and it actually works

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When we think of lenses, we usually think of chunks of metal or plastic with glass elements inside them. If somebody says “wooden lens” to us, we usually think of CNC or laser-cut models of lenses that don’t actually have any optical properties and are simply chunks of wood that resemble a lens. But not this time. Oh, no. This one’s a wooden lens, with glass optics that actually works.

And who do you think made this lens a reality? Yup, that’s right, weird lens king, Mathieu Stern, who teamed up with the folks at Hungarian photographer lens creator, Weird Lenses, to bring the lens to life and regardless of how it might see – which seems quite good – it looks pretty awesome, too!

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Canon publishes patents for a very compact 28-70mm f/2.8 zoom lens

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Canon has published a patent for two new zoom lens in the 28-70mm f/2.8 and 28-60mm f/2.8 focal length ranges. What makes them particularly interesting, though, is how tiny they are, for zooms with such wide aperture zooms, with both coming in at a little over 105mm long at the shorter end of their focal length limit of ~28mm. Even at their maximum zooms of 60mm and 67.9mm, they still only hit 132.38mm and 138.40mm respectively, making them very compact indeed.

The “Problem to be solved”, according to the Asobinet’s quote from the patent is “to provide a zoom lens having a short total length and a small size but having high optical performance”. And it suggests that thanks to recent development in cameras – namely, Canon’s gone mirrorless – it’s now possible to create a zoom lens of this focal length range and wide aperture that meets these parameters.

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This is the number one reason why you should shoot with prime lenses

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A lot of us fall into two camps when it comes to photography. Nope, I’m not talking about Nikon versus Canon or any such silliness. I’m talking about whether you’re predominantly a zoom lens shooter or a prime lens aficionado. Personally, I love a good prime lens. I don’t know if it’s because I shoot video or because I love to photograph people, but my camera kit seems to be full of mostly prime lenses.

There are many advantages to shooting with prime lenses, yes, even for landscape or travel photography. In this video, photographer James Popsys takes us for a walk in the beautiful Welsh countryside and tells us what he loves best about shooting with primes.

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Watch this complete guide to Canon EOS M system lenses before they’re all killed off

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The timing of the release of this particular video from Christopher Frost is curious, but release it he has. It’s a complete guide to every EF-M lens made for the Canon EOS M system from brands such as Canon themselves, Sigma, Viltrox, Samyang and Laowa. The reason the timing is a little odd is that Canon seems to be preparing to completely kill off the EOS M system at any time.

The Canon EOS M6 Mark II has been discontinued, with no signs of a replacement and two new “RF-M” mount APS-C bodies are expected to be announced at some point soon – possibly on May 24th. But that might mean that the used market is about to get flooded with EOS M gear. So, maybe now is the perfect time to brush up on what lenses are out there for anybody looking for a potential bargain.

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Stop obsessing over the latest lenses – It’s probably the least important part of shooting a photo

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A good photography practice should consider all elements in the creation of an image, from technique and lighting to mastery of gear and employment of the right tools for the job. It is imperative that a competitive photographer knows their gear and knows what gear to use.

However, some camera manufacturers have a vested interest in deceiving you. Some bloggers cling to unverified information because it gives them an air of authority. Today on the glossary of photographer’s Woo we’re back on optics.

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Nikon’s F mount legacy takes one step closer to death as Nikon kills off another seven lenses

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The demise of Nikon’s DSLR product line, along with the F mount lens system that Nikon has been using for over 60 years, was pretty much inevitable with the company’s transition to mirrorless. We’ve seen them slowly kill off their DSLRs and a few of the F mount lenses, and now a few more appear to have been added to that list, according to the Nikon USA website.

Seven lenses have disappeared from the current model lens list on the Nikon USA website with product pages for those lenses indicating that “This product has been archived”. This is code for “Don’t bother, it’s been discontinued”. While they’re still available from some retailers, they probably won’t be available for much longer and once stocks run out, new ones are gone forever.

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This new tiny camera overcomes the problems of metalenses by using a whole bunch of them at once

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Metalenses have been a thing for a while now. We first wrote about them here on DIYP back in 2016 when a team at Harvard first built a lens that’s even thinner than the waves of light being focused. The goal of such lenses is to essentially shrink cameras down as much as possible. They use nanostructures to focus the light instead of the optics we’re used to in more traditional lenses, but they have something of a flaw.

It’s kind of a fatal flaw, too, and that’s image quality. The images aren’t really sharp, nor are they high resolution – especially when it comes to wide angles. They’re “ok” with a little help from AI, but they’re not great. Now, though, a team of researchers at Nanjing University in China believe they’ve solved the issue, by not just using a single metalens, but a whole array of them, with each tuned to a range of different angles.

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