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Manfrotto and Gitzo team up with UNI to create a new international standard for tripod load capacity

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Load capacity on tripods (and monopods, heads, etc) has, until now, been a bit like guide numbers on speedlights. Numbers that seem to state the obvious, but are quite easy to fudge and make equipment appear more capable than it actually is when compared to its competitors. Manfrotto and Gitzo weren’t happy with this, so they’ve developed a new measuring protocol to offer full transparency to customers.

The reference practices for testing has been published by the UNI (recognised internationally by CEN and ISO). Manfrotto and Gitzo say they are both compliant with the testing procedures and have collaborated with the UNI and industry experts to create the new standard for testing payload across all photo and video products for the industry.

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IP ratings and what they mean to your gear. Camera makers, please be clear!

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We’ve seen how being weather sealed or weather resistant becomes a factor in modern days sales. This, of course, goes for actions cameras like the GoPro, but this also go for DSLRs and lighting equipment.

The rugged Pentax k5  for example which was ruggedly abused tested is rated at IPX2. What does it mean, though X2? hit the jump to find out.

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New Emoji Standard Is Finally Adding a Camera With Flash

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Yesterday, the Unicode Consortium (the regulating body of Unicode characters) released a version 7.0 of the Unicode standard including about 250 new Emoji icons. Emoji is the set of smilies we share over text messages and facebook, things like ☺ and and ☎ and ⚽ .

While the most talked about new Emojis will probably be the one with the middle finger raised, and the Volkan greeting sign, the new standard also has a few bits of photography related Emojis. Most notable are the Studio Microphone, Movie Camera, Film Frames, Camera With Flash and Film Projector

The standard does not dictate the look and feel of each Emoji, only the general idea behind it, so each font or application can implement them as they see fit.

The shapes of the reference glyphs used in these code charts are not prescriptive. Considerable variation is to be expected in actual fonts. The particular fonts used in these charts were provided to the Unicode Consortium by a number of different font designers, who own the rights to the fonts #

There is a mock up [pdf] found in the consortium announcement, but for the icon to be wildly available most apps and Os’s will have to update their code

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