At the end of the year I'm considering transitioning all of my News/Views into a single format. This is anticipated to be available only by subscription via a weekly email as well as a private site (see end of this digest for more). Don't worry, the rest of the information on my current sites would remain free.
To give you an idea of what that a weekly digest might look like, I've again taken the past week's news and built it into what this week's email would have looked like under this new plan. Enjoy. (p.s. If you're interested in potentially subscribing, be sure to click here to receive further updates as this idea gets developed.)
--------------------
LEDE ON
I've been talking with a few stores and camera execs recently. The period leading up to Black Friday has so far been sluggish in sales here in the US (not sure about other countries). Not terrible, but year-over-year down. Some of that, of course, was that the camera makers finally shifted to post-tariff pricing, which effectively is a price increase. Price increases at some point reduce demand, and we seem to be tottering on demand for cameras at the moment.
The goal, of course, is that the holiday sales (see "Sales" item below) will pick things back up and save the fiscal quarter in the US. Unfortunately, the discounts on holiday sales basically take us back down to pre-tariff pricing, so it's unclear just how much of a boost we'll see. It's possible that the sluggish October was due to people waiting for Black Friday, when they knew the prices would be better.
One question that I haven't seen anyone asking yet (but I've been asking of stores and execs) is what do they think January and February will be like? Curiously, my guess and their guesses are quite different. To a person, others all expect a lower level of sales volume that is going to make Q1 2026 numbers in the US tough to make. I don't.
My suspicion is that the tariffs will come completely off, allowing the camera makers to keep their current new pricing but announce (apparently) massive discounts, and that this will be used to make up that Q1 2026 volume. (Lest anyone read into this that they should postpone purchases until 2026, don't. There's no telling how the current administration will react to a key policy being overturned and what they might do next to muck things up for everyone.
--------------------
COMPACT
Leica announces the Q3 Monochrom
At the high end of the compact camera market, people often forget that Leica has and continues to thrive there. The luxury-popular 61mp Q3 this week got a new sibling, the Q3 Monochrom. Nothing really changes in terms of the camera design, as the Monochrom uses the same built-in 28mm f/1.7 ASPH Summilux lens, features the same 61/36/18mp crop-to-simulate-longer-lens capability, and is viewed via the same high quality 5.76m dot EVF. If you're into video, remember that the Q3's also are capable of 8K video. At US$7790, the Q3 Monochrom sits pretty much at the top of the compact camera market.
One thing I appreciate is that Leica remains committed to making monochrome cameras. Twenty years ago I started asking for monochrome-only digital cameras (disclaimer: the digital camera I helped design in 1994 was monochrome), noting that there were clear advantages to doing so. The aliasing impacts of Bayer filtration take away proper edge definition, but that Bayer filtration also stops some light from getting to the image sensor, meaning that you get more dynamic range on a monochrome camera. If you look at the older Q2 versus Q2 Monochrom for instance, at ISO 100, the Monochrom gets about 1.5 stops more usable dynamic range than the Bayer version (the same thing is true of the Leica M11 versus M11 Monochrom). I expect to see the same for the Q3 versus Q3 Monochrom.
Those still channeling their inner Ansel see such gains (acuity, DR) as highly useful. That's particularly true for black and white output, where converting a Bayer file sometimes makes it difficult to work with bright highlight or deep shadow detail as well as using sharpening to remove the aliasing changes edges. Sharpening methods change both sides of an edge, making the edge improper to reality.
I'd almost certainly own a Leica Monochrom of some kind if I were doing events, weddings, or maybe even landscape work still. Unfortunately, for sports and wildlife, the restrictive lens nature of the M and Q models means I could only use a Monochrom for some of any given session, meaning that I'd end up with a mix of black and white and color, which I don't like to do. Yes, I know that's just a personal proclivity and I could convert the color images to black and white (with limitations stated above), as others see no problems mixing the two. But I was trained in the Hollywood feature film mentality, so once I pick a style for a set of related work, I want to grade everything to that. I mentioned personal projects last week, so maybe I need to take on a personal project where I figure out how black and white and color images work together to say something beyond what each can do individually.
This is sort of a long-winded way of saying this: I wish Leica would do things: (1) make an SL3 Monochrom; and (2) improve their focus system so that it works better on long telephoto action work. I'd love to take that into the depths of Botswana's wilds.
So why aren't the other camera makers making monochrome cameras? True, Ricoh has announced a monochrome GR model, so there is some movement. Back in 2005 I did a survey of my site visitors that suggested that at the higher end of the market my sites cater to, somewhere between 10-15% would likely purchase a monochrome version of their favorite camera (or even sample another brand). I don't know what that number is today as I haven't surveyed that particular question lately.
From a technical standpoint, making a monochrome image sensor is almost solely about not adding a Bayer layer. However, most makers are doing the Bayer/Microlens/Phase Detect create all as a single step these days, so they might have to dedicate a new machine to add what I call the "toppings" if they wanted to make a monochrome camera, and that would certainly cause the camera maker to send the number crunchers into full crunch mode. Changes to the production are a cost, so what is the additional volume a monochrome version would add that presents a growth opportunity rather than just spinning the financial wheels? This is exactly why Leica can do it, by the way: they are a low volume, high price vendor to start with. Even modest volume gains at minimal extra cost would look good for their bottom line (which lately, has been a very good looking bottom line). For Nikon? Nope. Their real need right now is to increase volume fast while keeping costs lower. Nikon needs to sell more of what they're producing, not produce more variants.
--------------------
SALES
It's that time of year. Your InBox is full of "buy me" invites, the rumor sites are cranking affiliate links at obsessive levels, and of course the camera makers have their usual instant rebates in full operation. I generally don't do "here's a sale" posts, nor are any of the following affiliate links (disclaimer: B&H is this site's exclusive advertiser). But I think it helps to have one place where you can consider most of the seasonal offerings, so here's this year's version.
Software
Note that some of the app store deals are tightly controlled as to day and date (typically Black Friday and/or Cyber Monday), so clicking on them early won't help you. Some others require you enter a code you enter as a coupon when you check out. A few are longer seasonal discounts, already available and may extend past Cyber Monday. If you're interested in my macOS software suggestions, you can find them here on this site.
- Adobe Creative Cloud: full Creative Cloud Pro for US$35/month instead of US$70/month on a yearly plan (students and teachers: US$20/month).
- Avalanche: for Lightroom/Capture One/Luminar each are US$59.
- Cascable Studio: tethering software (discount not yet posted)
- Compresto: Compress 4K losslessly (40% off code BFCM25)
- Corel: up to 60% off (CorelDraw, Painter, PaintShop Pro, VideoStudio, AfterShot Pro)
- Darkroom: 50% off first year subscription
- DxO: up to 50% off PhotoLab, NIK Collection, PureRaw, ViewPoint, FilmPack
- Fission: audio editor
- HoudahGeo7: geotagging ~30% off
- Imagen: AI editing/culling/styling 50% off
- Kompressor: HEIC to PNG/JPEG converter
- Luminar: Neo photo editor up to 77% off
- Nitro Photo: Pro photo editor/manager
- On1 Photo RAW 2026: photo editor 15-30% off
- Peakto: media management 20% (BF4CREATORS code)
- Play: save YouTube/Vimeo videos for direct play
- Raw Power: JPEG/RAW editor and manager
- Topaz Labs: 43% off Studio (all apps), 15% off single apps
Hardware
Some links here—such as those for the camera makers—are to a B&H search page, as this is the easiest way for me provide the full(ish) list. Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon, and Sony highly regulate what dealers can charge, so there's virtually no pricing differential between them.
In addition, a number of vendors have their own discounts active during the holiday:
- Kolari: US$75 off IR conversions, 15% to 67% off filters
- Meike: up to US$118 off lenses
- Nextorage: various discounts (available at dealers that carry them, such as B&H)
- Smallrig: up to 30% off
- Viltrox: 20% off
Miscellany
Finally, here's a few items that don't fit into the above categories:
- Aura: Frames for photos 20% off
- Canvas prints: up to 95% off canvas prints
- Digitzed media: 55% off
- Glass prints: 25% off (MERRY25 code)
- Labels: 25% Field Made labels (BFCM25 code)
- Shutterfly: up to 50% off
As I learn about other holiday season discounts, I'll update this item.
--------------------
TIP#1
While going through every article on this site and slowly trying to bring them up to date I found myself struggling with a couple of small things. One that’s important has to do with card corruption.
Early on in the digital era, it was a fact that not all cameras correctly dealt with file deletion. It was not only possible to corrupt a card by performing a file deletion in the camera, it was highly likely on some models. Moreover, despite DCF and other standards, it seems that early on none of the camera companies had actually locked into how the old CP/M (and later MSDOS) FAT/directory was defined and used correctly. I actually put some of my old Silicon Valley tools to work and found terrible errors in some of the earliest cameras in the way they set up a card partition.
As time progressed, things settled down some, but not completely. After the worst of those errors were addressed by the camera makers, there were still persistent reports of deletion issues. Almost invariably, these came in full or near full card conditions. A user would discover they had no (or little) room left on a card, so would then begin deleting images from the card to make space. This exposed a number of different bugs in the file handling of cameras.
What happened in these situations is that FAT/directory itself didn’t get directly corrupted, but because the file deletions spread across multiple not-necessarily sequential sectors on the card, coupled with the fact that files are always variable in size (due to differences in detail captured), the write mechanisms would struggle to keep up with your photography and eventually trigger an error, and that error triggered random things happening, which could corrupt the card.
Both the above problems were recoverable. Well, at least most of the images on the card could be recovered. But it took structure-aware and file-aware software to piece things back together correctly.
SD and CFe cards—the two currently favored card types—handle data differently.
In the case of the SD card, the camera is the primary memory manager and fully responsible for what happens on the card. Most camera companies seem to have fixed their FAT/directory and file deletion errors, and thus generally avoid the problems I note above.
For CFe cards, things are a little different, as these cards have a built-in memory controller that’s managing where individual bits of files go. They’re trying to load balance the limited life of the NAND chips involved. We also have 2D and 3D structures within the NAND itself, as well as sub-organization of the cells themselves.
If you start with a completely erased (or new) card, things work a little differently with SD and CFe. On SD cards your image file is usually written sequentially onto the card; your image essentially lives together (adjacent cells). On a CFe card your image file is split into small bits that are scattered as to where they're stored in the NAND structure. Technically, this is more risky, as an error in the memory management could lose track of a piece of a file, but we’ve been using NANDs long enough now (SSD drives use NANDs in a similar way) so that keeping track of what’s going on tends to be standardized and reliable. One key difference, though, is that (most) images on an SD card can be recovered after write/deletion/cell errors. For CFe cards, we don't have the same ability to post recover once card structures are breeched.
What I was contemplating on one page edit of this site was an instruction to avoid deleting files in the camera. Current state-of-the-art in card read/write is pretty reliable, both in camera and off. The bugs you’d be likely to trigger deleting a file on camera have been (almost entirely?) eradicated. Still, I think it wise to avoid file deletion on camera whenever possible—that’s file deletion, not card format—as it adds another function that can trigger a bug. However I no longer avoid doing so on my cameras, and haven’t found my cards to be any less reliable, nor am I hearing regular reports from others of issues.
Best card practices today are:
- Format your card in your camera before each use. This insures that the structure on the card matches what the camera thinks it should be.
- Don’t share cards between cameras. The DCF specification will trigger a sub-folder for each camera, and numbers get incremented as they do. While everyone seems to agree on structure now, I can’t guarantee that. It’s also not recommended that you share cards between traditional FAT cameras (e.g. Nikon) and AVCHD cameras (typically Sony). This generates folder proliferation, and makes it more difficult to find the file you’re looking for.
- Delete on your camera if you have to, but keep deletion activity to a minimum if you can. Deletion is a different function than storing. Any bug between what the two functions think should be happening can be a problem. However these days I think it unlikely you’d trigger a problem. Again, the primary time when that might occur is when the card is nearly full. It is still possible to delete one image from a card, take another image, and that new image be larger than the space left on the card because it contains more detail.
- Retire cards regularly. Cards do not have infinite life spans. The memory storage cells on cards have limited life spans for writes (near infinite life spans for reads). SD cards are more vulnerable to cell write death than the actively managed CFe cards, because the CFe's memory manager will map a dead NAND out of its storage use. But both types of cards will eventually start losing some error free capacity if you constantly use them. My current recommendation is this: buy new cards when you buy a new camera, and retire your old cards at that point.
In the end, I left some language intact when I edited those articles, and downplayed other “don’t do that” language. Better to be safe than sorry.
--------------------
TIP#2
Old iMac as a Second monitor. This one came up in an email question from someone who was upgrading from an old Intel-based 27" 5K Retina iMac to one of the new Apple Silicon Macs. They miss that beautiful big display but don't want to spring for the new 5K Studio Display.
It used to be that iMacs (until 2014) had a special feature called Target Display Mode that you could enable to connect them as a monitor via Mini DisplayPort (2009-2010 27" iMacs) or Thunderbolt (2011-2014 iMacs). It was (normally) as simple as connecting the correct cable and pressing Command+F2 on your iMac.
Apple eventually removed that feature, so most folk with more recent 27" 5K iMacs think you can no longer use them as a second monitor for another Mac. That's not true. There are two reliable third party options:
- Astropad's Luna Display, a US$90 USB dongle that can make your iMac into a second monitor for your new Apple Silicon Mac, as long as the iMac is running macOS High Sierra or later (almost a given).
- Duetdisplay's Duet Air, a US$48/year subscription that uses software at each of two Macs (cabled or Wi-Fi enabled) to let the iMac work in what they call Duet Target Display Mode.
So don't go throwing that iMac away yet (or trading it for next to nothing). It's a perfectly fine 5K display still.
--------------------
Wrapping Up
And in other news
▶︎ The LUTs are coming. Still and video are slowly merging in terms of visual look. Nikon introduced RED LUTs for their mirrorless cameras, and Panasonic seems to be going all in with LUTs forming their whole visual modification system. This week Fujifilm announced that most of their Film Simulations will be available as LUTs. (What's a LUT? A Look Up Table. At its simplest form: if a captured digital number is X, the output should be Y.)
So what's changing? Nothing and everything. For most of digital camera history, color and contrast decisions (for JPEG files) were a "secret sauce" at each camera company. Canon Picture Style, Fujifilm Film Simulations, Nikon Picture Controls, and Sony Creative Look were all secret sauces. Rarely did we ever get a look inside the black box to see what one of those choices did versus another. Despite Fujifilm's naming, I don't find their choices to perfectly simulation any film stock, it's more of a broad paint brush they're using.
Meanwhile, the video world was using grading of data in very calculated, specific manipulations. Because camera angles for every scene had to match each other and the Director/Cinematographer were placing styling decisions on top of that, you needed a very technical way of matching color and contrast, which eventually led to LUTs. Because the mirrorless cameras are all hybrid still/video devices, there's long been a cry for making the two match visually. If I like the still secret sauce, why can't that be the way the video looks, too? (And vice versa.)
Thing is, once something is encoded into a LUT, we can all reverse engineer it and see what the camera makers actually did. I'm a believer in open and useful information, so I'm all for seeing every style encoded as a LUT. That doesn't mean I'd copy them (I'm looking at you Vivid), but understanding what an image or video style is doing and what is being manipulated becomes useful in developing my own styles (LUTs). I'm curious to see how far this goes, but Fujifilm publishing Film Simulations as LUTs is an interesting move, as their secret sauce won't be so secret any more.
▶︎ YACI (Yet Another Chinese Import) is almost a daily occurrence. Here are some of the more interesting ones this week:
- Viltrox 85mm f/1.4 Pro. This US$600 lens has been available for the Sony FE mount for awhile, but this week Viltrox announced the Z-mount version. It's a nice option for those building an f/1.4 kit (e.g. Nikon 35mm f/1.4 and 50mm f/1.4).
- DJI Osmo Action 6. I use an Osmo Action 5 as my GoPro-type video camera (sometimes referred to as an "action" camera or a "point of view" [POV] camera). I've got a mount that allows me to lock my Action 5 pretty much anywhere on the Land Cruiser I use in Botswana, and I tend to alternate between Timelapse and regular video being recorded as we're driving in the National Parks. So of course I was interested in what the new version offered. It boils down to a variable aperture lens (f/2 to f/4; the Action 6 is f/2.8); a square image sensor that allows 4:3 4K/120P that can be re-cropped later; and some other minor things. The big news, if there's any with the 6 versus the 5 is that you can now easily post-create vertical 9:16 from your footage (e.g. TikTok-ready video). If you're looking for this type of camera, you now have the choice of GoPro Hero 13, Insta360 Ace Pro 2, and DJI Osmo Action 6 at the top of their model lines. I'd gravitate to one of the latter two for three reasons: the magnetic mounting systems, the seamless wireless mic capabilities, and the better mobile app support. At the moment, though, I'm not looking to replace my Action 5, as the primary new thing it delivers that I might use is f/2 instead of f/2.8, generally not something I've found I've needed. I've now passed my GoPro and Insta360 cameras on to other users after making my decision.
- Zeniko ZA12 Flash. With the camera makers mostly ignoring flash, the Chinese have jumped to the rescue. The problem? Often the result is a flash that's basically 1970 in a box. This small, retro-looking unit is a dirt simple as you can get in terms of setability. Figure out what aperture the camera is using and move one dial on the flash to match that, then use the other dial to either (a) perform manual flash at 1/64 to full power, or (b) move the second dial so that the ISO value on it matches what you're using on the camera, which produces a form of Automatic flash (not TTL flash). Critically missing in all the marketing, sales, and promotion materials for this new US$50 flash? The Guide Number. I did find a "refer to manual" mention at some point sleuthing their materials, but their Web site doesn't actually contain the manual to download, so I remain in the dark about what their use of the word "Bright" actually means (see what I did there?). Zeniko makes a ZT-08 flash that's even smaller that performs TTL, by the way. It apparently is also "Bright". Why is it important to know the Guide Number (GN)? Because Guide Number / Aperture = Distance. A flash that is GN20 (feet) used at f/2 produces light to 10 feet. A flash with a GN40 (feet) produces light to 20 feet. (Most of the world uses the metric system, so the GN is stated in meters for most flash units, but the formula remains the same; the distance is just expressed in meters.)
------------
You'll probably note the heading name change this week. One of the reasons I'm making these changes out in the open is so that I can adjust and tune what I'm doing based upon feedback.
I received one comment from someone that they "didn't need another repeat of news stories." Those of you with long memories know that I've never really just written news stories in this space. My special sauce is that I try to provide context and commentary on product and other announcements. I'll admit that I've gone back and forth on how I use the terms Views or Commentary quite a bit over time. As I adjust the way I do things, I'm finding I need to start nailing that down so that it's clearer.
I believe that one reason many of you read bythom (or the News/Views on my other sites) is for context and explanation. It's one thing to say Leica announced a new camera and give the specs (see first story, above), it's another thing to explain why you might want to consider it (i.e. acuity and dynamic range). As camera features and performance becomes less dramatically different, but more nuanced, it's more important than ever to sort out what a change or update means in practical terms. One of the things I'm seeking to do with the upcoming changes to my sites and byThom Max is do an even better job of that than I've done in the past.
Congratulations on making it this far. As you can see, this weekly "newsletter" style for News/Views can be quite elaborate and lengthy, particularly once I add in video instruction and other planned items. The fact that it will be sent (mostly) weekly would be part of its benefit: you wouldn't have to scroll all my sites daily to find what I might have written, because you've subscribed for everything to come directly to your email InBox as it gets published each week. By putting everything in one spot, in a single format, it also saves me time.
My current intention is to remove News/Views from all but the zsystemuser.com site (where you'll still get shorter, one or two paragraph news items about the latest Z offerings), to remove all ads and affiliate links from my sites, and generate on-going revenue through modest subscription fees that include the weekly News/Commentary newsletter, ongoing video instruction/presentations, monthly hangouts, and more. I call this new thing byThom Max, because I'll be on maximum while doing it, including going to and reporting from as many of the trade shows I can, as well as other events, covering them for the newsletter.
I'll have more about byThom Max when (and if) I kick it off in early 2026. In the meantime, if you're interested in subscribing, click here to receive updates.
