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Hot Shoe

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On the calendar

· Trade shows and launch events, this week's stories from each corner of the industry, and what its press is covering.

On view

This week, from that corner the newest stories from the corner of the industry you picked

The wire their own posts, translated

How pictures get made in 2026 from the industry's own reports

Sources

Fetched every six hours, linked to the original

About

The small bracket on top of every camera, from a phone rig to an ARRI.

The hot shoe is where the flash goes, and the microphone, and the monitor, and whatever the next decade bolts on. Every camera has one and nobody photographs it. This magazine is named after it because that is where the whole business meets: the body, the glass, the light, the sound, and the person holding it.

I shot news in Gothenburg for nine years and documentary for hire after that, then stopped taking assignments to write about the tools. Since 2021 I live in Tokyo, ten minutes from the used-camera shops of Shinjuku, which is not an accident: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Ricoh and Sigma make almost everything worth pointing at a subject, and their own press writes about it first, in Japanese. So this magazine reads it there, and in German, French, Italian and Spanish, and in English from the reviewers who actually put a card in the slot — around eighty sources and thirty channels, counted and plotted so you can see what is moving.

Bodies and lenses, cinema cameras and drones, film and the darkroom, firmware and the software that finishes the picture, the rumours before the launch and the reviews after it, and the photographers and shows the rest of it is for. I test what I write about on a job before a word goes down. I shoot film on Sundays and do not think that makes me interesting.

A story here is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the link to whoever reported it. We never reprint the article, and the picture belongs to the photographer or the maker. A story written in Japanese appears in Japanese, as its author set it down; the link goes to the original.

— Mara Lindqvist, Tokyo

HISTORY · TELEVISION

Television cameras

From a tube that looked at a lit studio to a camcorder on a reporter's shoulder: how TV pictures were made.

Tubes

1923–1950s

1923Zworykin files a television patent
1933The iconoscope, first practical camera tube, shown in June
1946RCA TK-10: an image orthicon tube and a four-lens turret
1950The vidicon tube: smaller cameras
1950sRCA TK-40/41: colour, three pickup tubes, much heavier

Tape

1956–1970s

1956Ampex 2-inch quadruplex videotape
1967Portapak: video one person can carry
1971U-Matic, the ¾-inch cassette
1970sElectronic news gathering: video cameras instead of film for news

Camcorder

1980s–

1980sCCD sensors replace pickup tubes
1982Sony Betacam: camera and recorder in one
late 1980sBetacam SP replaces film for single-camera documentary

THE STORY

Why the networks wanted tape

Before 1956 the only way to record television was film. Ampex's videotape let networks replay a show hours later for the western time zones.

THE STORY

News before video

Before the Portapak, remote news was shot on 16 mm film and turned into video with a telecine.

THE STORY

The first Portapak

Sony's DV-2400 Video Rover: a black-and-white camera and a separate half-inch recorder.