New leaks and more info about the upcoming Sigma 500mm f/5.6 lens

On top you can see the upcoming Sigma 500mm f/5.6 lens mounted on the Sony A1. It’s kind of an odd style…almost looks like it has some teleconverter built-in or not? Anyway, I got some additional specs:

Sigma 500mm f/5.6 specs:

  • Lightweight lens…less than 1,5kg and so the lightest telephoto prime lens you can buy.
  • Very fast AF on Sony A1 (lens has linear motor)
  • The lens sharper than the Sony 200-600 G
  • very low chromatic aberration
  • Coming for Sony E and Leica L mount cameras
  • Announcement on February 21.

My guess it’s that will cost $1,500-$2000 less than the current Sigma 500mm f/4.0 for Canon/Nikon.

Topaz Photo AI v2.3.0 released…and a new teaser for the next launch

There is a new v2.3.0 update for Topaz Photo Ai (get it here). At the same time Topaz CEO Eric Young launched a teaser for the upcoming new version:

—

Hi, and thanks so much for trusting our products with your work over the past few years.

In 2024, our photo and video products will experience the most significant evolution since our first AI product six years ago. I wanted to share what you can expect out of our products in the next few years.

We believe that generative AI should improve your work rather than replace it, so our product development philosophy focuses on three principles:

  1. Enhancement vs replacement: for improving your work without altering its core essence.
  2. Natural and photorealistic results, vs fantastical: for your photos and videos where preserving reality matters.
  3. On-device processing, vs cloud: for a faster workflow, more editing options, and private processing.

We think that these principles are essential for professional use cases, but currently undervalued in AI research. As such, we’re accelerating this direction with our three core products:

Photo AI
Photo AI is designed for photographers, and solves many photo quality problems like noise reduction and sharpening better than anything else. In 2024, we will use generative AI to greatly improve the quality and experience of other photo editing tasks.

Video AI
Video AI delivers you sharp, steady, and smooth footage without motion artifacts. In 2024, you will see improved AI model quality, a better app experience, and more integrations for professional editing workflows.

Gigapixel
Built for everyone, Gigapixel 7 brings improved upscaling model quality and better usability. Later this year, we’ll release fundamental improvements to our upscaling models that unlock another level of quality, better than anything else you’ve seen yet. Afterwards, we will bring Gigapixel to more platforms than just desktop.

We’re incredibly excited about this direction, and you’ll soon see some of these improvements in the next few months.

We’d also love your feedback as we’re filling our roadmap for the rest of the year. What would you love to be able to do with your images and videos that you can’t currently? Is there anything you wish our current products would do better? We will read and consider every comment.

Thank you again for trusting our products, and we will do everything possible to continue earning that trust!

Thanks,
Eric Yang
CEO, Topaz Labs

—-

 v2.3.0 Press release:

This week we have several new additions to the app and updates to existing tools as well. There are 2 new upscaling models – Standard v2 and High Fidelity v2, as well as update to the Remove model for Windows machines. Please see the notes below for more information about these models. Additionally, the Object Selection Brush is now available for use in the Remove tool. Finally, the Adobe Lightroom Classic plug-in will now add images back to their original Collections once exporting is done.

Standard v2 and High Fidelity v2:

  • For Standard we’ve improved the deblur consistency (blurry patch issue)
  • For High Fidelity we’ve improved the grain preserving consistency for low denoise/remove jpeg sliders
    • For use cases requiring keeping original noise/grain, select this model and tune down the two sliders.
  • For High Fidelity we’ve fixed the tile blending artifacts
  • For both models we’ve fixed the tile artifacts on Apple Silicon Mac’s Neural Engine
    • There is an option to turn off Neural Engine but it will slow down processing
  • For quality in general, the models should be more generative

Remove Model:

  1. Improved the speed of the tool via steps distillation
  2. Solved some quality issues via larger data augmentation

Note: If you are experiencing issues with the Remove tool on macOS Sonoma a potential fix is updating to the latest version of Sonoma

CIPA data for the whole year 2023: Mirrorless makes +10,9%

Finally we got the detailed CIPA camera and lens shipment data for the whole year 2023. It contains a lot of interesting data:

  • Shipment of cameras (fixed and interchangeable) did drop by 3,6% in terms of numbers and increased by 4.9% in terms of value.
  • Shipment of mirrorless cameras increased by 18,6% in terms of numbers and increased by 10,9% in terms of value.
  • Shipment of DSLR cameras did drop by 36% in terms of numbers and increased by 28,9% in terms of value.
  • Shipment of fixed lens cameras did drop by 17,4% in terms of numbers and increased by 8,9% in terms of value.
  • Shipment of interchangeable lenses did drop by 0,9% in terms of numbers and increased by 6,7% in terms of value.

What does this tell us? The decade long decline stopped. In terms of value both mirrorless and lens sames increased quite a bit. So overall we can look forward to a 2024 that should have a similar pace like 2023 had. And this is good as manufacturer now don’t have to fear the market will shrink further.