LEDE ON
The camera company executive interviews with the media at the CP+ show in Japan are slowly hitting the Interwebs as PR at each company signs off on them. One thing that seems to have happened is that the kimono widened a little and we got some talk about what many companies are working on (the OM Pen F isn't dead yet, though Generalissimo Franco still is). I suspect that's because they're embarrassed that they didn't introduce anything new in months, and want customers to realize that they haven't all left the engineering buildings for a long hike up Mt. Fuji never to return. Just as soon as someone tells them where the new parts all went and that they're ready to use, they'll get right back to work.
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New Compact
Panasonic muddles on
The new Panasonic TZ300 strikes me as a "must do something" launch. Except that what they did is take out the viewfinder from a TZ200 and not add anything particularly significant. But at least Panasonic has a compact superzoom again.
Let's start with the sameness between the TZ200 and the new TZ300: same 20mp 1" image sensor (though it's now backlit), same 24-340mm (equivalent) f/3.3-8 lens, same fixed Rear LCD. There's nothing really wrong with the image sensor; it's fine for its size, and I'm sure the BSI version is going to deliver maybe a third of a stop more dynamic range. The lens I found wanting on the TZ200, though, and nothing seems to have changed. Sony's RX100VII lens, which wasn't exactly given accolades, beats the same Leica-designed 24-340mm (equivalent) f/3.3-8 lens that was on the TZ200 I tested. Maybe I had a bad sample? But I seriously doubt that, as others complained about it, too. I suspect that diffraction is a limiting factor on that lens, and it had quality control issues the last go around.
Meanwhile, we still get DFD (Didn't Focus Dead-on; no, wait, Depth From Defocus) will all its issues, and a video burst for continuous action (4K Photo). The 4K video, unfortunately, is cropped, so you basically end up with a 36-540mm lens when 4K is invoked in any way. Yes, we do now get a (Europe-required) USB-C port for communication and power, but we get a micro (Type D) HDMI port when a microphone port probably would have been more useful.
The sad thing is this: eight years ago the TZ200 had very good control and handling for a compact superzoom. But it left a lot to be desired in the quality of the stills and photos that were taken. This new TZ300 pretty much is identical in control and handling to its predecessor, but Panasonic simply didn't really address any of the shortcomings we reviewers noted eight years ago, and added that new one of "no viewfinder."
So what we have here is that a Camera Company sees that compacts are selling again, so dusts off something they stopped making many years ago and puts no effort into improving it. Missing from the TZ300 are phase detect autofocus, Panasonic LUTs (!), a tilting and better Rear LCD, and a bunch more things you'd expect these days. It's as if Toyota resurrected the Scion thinking that its time had finally come.
When companies take the wraps off something they had mothballed and put no effort into their iteration effort, to me that shows not just a lack of imagination and creativity, but almost a sense of desperateness.
Which brings me to this: does Panasonic actually have a coherent brand strategy? Across both stills and video, I'd say no, they don't. Not when you can now buy an eight-year old design that's been downgraded.
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Legal
Did we win or lose?
The judgement in GoPro's lawsuit against Insta360 has been published. Both sides are declaring victory. On the utility patent side (the technical stuff), Insta360 was found not to have infringed on stabilization, distortion correction, aspect ratio, and leveling patents. On the design patent side (how it looks), Insta360 was found infringing on the Hero camera design, at least for Insta360's original models (they've since changed their design). Insta360 claims they spent at least US$10m defending themselves against GoPro's suits. It's unclear how much GoPro spent as it appears to be buried in General and Administration expenses, though their 10K for 2025 did list legal expenses as "substantial."
As to why GoPro sued in the first place, it's easy to see the management motivation: sales to Asia and Pacific (APAC) in 2023: US$245m. In 2025: US$77m. GoPro's making noise about the new camera(s?) they'll launch at NAB later this month. Let's hope that gets them back to innovating rather than protecting.
Meanwhile, DJI has now sued Insta360 for patent infringement on drones. It seems like all the action camera companies are now drowning in lawyers.
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Tip
macOS updates require free drive space
I've seen this pop up on a number of sites, so I wanted to warn you so that it doesn't happen to you. When you update from an earlier macOS to the current macOS Tahoe (26.4), if you have older external drives mounted that are not AFPS GUID formatted, the update may try to update those drives to the current Apple standard (and you want that, because AFPS has safeguards that the old Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format doesn't).
The problem happens when you don't have enough free storage space left on a drive. The process of changing formatting requires a great deal of free space (Apple says 40GB). Apparently the update process doesn't check if it has enough space (or perhaps generates an unknown need for space and can't calculate whether you have it). Drives that fail the updating process become unusable as they're in multiple formats that haven't been resolved yet.
So: don't keep external drives attached to your Mac when making macOS updates that might involve drive format updates.
Moreover, you should always have a complete backup of your internal drive, as if you ever encounter this problem when trying to update the internal drive, it can end up unbootable and you'll have to perform a complete reinstall to get it running. I've warned about not accepting Apple's minimal SSD sizes for a number of reasons, and this is one of them: those of you with 128GB internal SSDs can get to a storage threshold that makes the system not updatable (though you would have also noticed and ignored performance drops before you got there).
This is one of the trickier aspects of high tech: deprecation of older technologies can result in loss of data if you're not paying attention. But we need deprecations to happen to make progress in features and performance. Additionally, in today's environment, you really can't afford to just "freeze" your system and forgo security updates, so you need to be updating.
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Wrapping Up
And in other news
▶︎ Apple discovers ticoRAW. With version 26.4 of macOS (Tahoe) Apple finally has built in support for Nikon's High efficiency* and High efficiency raw formats. Apple becomes the last major player dealing with raw files to enable this support. Apple's support page, however, still lists that only Lossless compressed is supported, but that page was last updated in February 2026.
▶︎ AI gobbles up Sony cards. Just in time for World Backup Day, Sony is no longer supplying CFexpress cards (Type A or B), or Tough SD cards to dealers and customers. Referencing the shortage of NAND chips, Sony made the decision to at least temporarily halt distribution of cards, as they cannot guarantee supply. This is a bit disturbing as Sony is a fairly major player in storage cards (though their Nextorage spinout may now be bigger).
▶︎ Nikon divests Mark Roberts Motion Control. When Nikon acquired the British-based MRMC back in 2016, it raised a lot of eyebrows. Yes, the MRMC robotic arms were mounting Nikon DSLRs for unattended placement at big sporting events at the time, but the big use of arms with remote control really happens at a level and in areas where Nikon has lost ground (Olympic events, Hollywood, etc.). Curiously, now that Nikon has elbowed back into Hollywood with RED and has one of the best mirrorless cameras for sports in the Z9, Nikon is now in the process of selling MRMC. I don't think the recent write downs at the MRMC division played well in Tokyo, and I had been expecting MRMC to play more closely with Nikon Imaging, but MRMC seems to have a mind of its own. While their robot arms have been used in ways that caught viral attention recently (Apple TV+'s Severance and the Netflix Ed Sheehan one shot production in New York), I've noticed that more and more I'm seeing non-Nikon cameras on Mark Roberts arms. Since I'm planning on attending the NAB Show coming up, I had already noticed that MRMC had a separate booth—though across the aisle—from Nikon this year. Now I think we know why (RED is in Nikon's booth).
▶︎ DNG is now an ISO Standard raw image format. Twenty years later, Adobe's attempt to create a standard for raw files is now officially recognized by the International Standards Organization (as ISO 12234-4). Back in the early days of Fred Miranda and dpreview forums, many discussions about the then splintering raw format definitions were visible (all camera maker raw formats actually utilize a form of TIFF under the covers). It was a heated topic, particularly when companies such as Nikon introduced encrypted white balance information into their raw files. The issue then, and still present to this day, was archival longevity of raw files, as the formats for Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic, and Sony are all proprietary and not documented in a way that would allow someone to write a 100% accurate processing tool in the future (or today, for that matter). At the moment, Leica, Ricoh, and Sigma save raw files as DNG. Whether the standardization process will get any of the major makers to convert future products to DNG is unknown, but for a company like Nikon that embraces ISO standards throughout their organization, I wonder if this might be the tipping point for the future.