"No flaws for a lens in this price range." —review summary for a low cost Chinese lens
Okay, I'm game. What flaws should be allowed for different price ranges? ;~)
I get it. We all grapple with trying to figure out how to assess value of something. As in "for its price, it's a good value." Such a comment would suggest that you're getting better results than you'd expect at such a price.
But let's be clear: all lenses have flaws. Even the very best lens I've ever tested (58mm f/0.95 NOCT S) cannot take an image plane in front of the camera and perfectly reproduce it at the image sensor.
TTArtisan Super Mini Magnetic LED Light with Film Canister Look —a new product being promoted by affiliate links
Talk about your mixed messaging design. I keep seeing people write that "it's cute", though Verge did have the clickbait headline "There's a cheap LED camera light hidden in this fake film roll." The light isn't all that cute to me. First of all, it isn't exactly the size of a film canister, which means that the design is all about nostalgia, not practice (the same size would have let it fit into film canister cases and other accessories). The other strange thing about the design is that the side facing the subject mostly looks like a flat light panel: all the "film mojo" design is mostly facing the photographer ;~).
TTArtisan did get one thing right: the magnetic cold shoe mount. You can leave that in your hot shoe much like a hot shoe protector, and then pull out the little light and have it instantly connect when you need it.
"The [DIGIC] Accelerator is the chip that receives signals from the sensor and performs autofocus, subject detection, etc. DIGIC X does the image development." —Canon executive describing R1
This isn't strange other than it reveals something inherent in the technology being used, which we don't seem to see much from the Japanese companies.
However, it points out an interesting bit that has oscillated in digital camera design over the years: the use of dedicated parts versus the use of an all-around part. For cost (and to some degree, basic speed) purposes, you really want to drive data straight to a single SoC (System on Chip). In Canon's case, that would be DIGIC (Nikon uses EXPEED, Sony is BIONZ). However, as performance becomes more and more a factor, you don't want to tie up a single chip doing everything. That seems to be what Canon is doing with the R1: get the data to something that is doing critical performance-related activity, e.g. focus, and then pass it on to something else to do anything else that needs to be done, e.g. the viewfinder display of that data.
This seems to imply that focus in the R1 may be done without demosaicing data, or at least traditional demosaicing. They may also tailor the accelerator chip at the front end using a different mix of CPU/GPU/NPU cores than the trailing processor chip.
Frankly, the camera companies are doing themselves a disservice by not fully documenting and putting into accurate marketing messages what's happening with the technologies inside their products. That story is interesting and informative to the sophisticated users they now seek.
