Nobody Shipped a Flagship, and It Was the Best Week in Months

Count the announcements this week and you get one entry-level full-frame body, one micro four thirds compact, one anniversary edition, one portrait lens, one firmware for a cinema camera, nine cinema lenses that do not exist yet, and a 87-gram toy. No flagship. No new sensor. And I cannot remember a week where the wire was more useful to a working photographer, because every one of those things is a decision somebody will actually make with their own money.

Start with Canon, because everybody did. The EOS R8 Mark II is the second generation of Canon's lightest full-frame camera, three and a half years after the first. The numbers that matter: 24 megapixels, in-body stabilisation rated at 7.5 stops, an autofocus joystick, 4K60 oversampled from 6K, 1,799 euros in Germany, shipping in the second half of October. The first R8 had none of the first three. One mechanism, explained once: in-body stabilisation moves the sensor itself to cancel the shake of your hands, so it works with every lens you own, including the old manual ones; 7.5 stops means a shot you would have needed 1/250 of a second for can, in theory, be taken at half a second. In practice, halve the claim and it is still the reason to buy this body over the old one.

What the press argued about was the shape. Photografix in Berlin called the new design polarising in its headline; DPReview's review title says major fixes but frustrations remain; and Digital Camera Watch in Tokyo, which tends to be kinder to Japanese makers, reviewed it as an entry full-frame that matches the upper models. Three desks, three countries, same camera, and the disagreement is about the corners of the body, not the pictures. That tells you the pictures are fine.

OM System, meanwhile, quietly did something the PEN line has not done in fifteen years. The new OM SYSTEM PEN is the first PEN with an integrated electronic viewfinder and the first with IPX1 dust and splash sealing. IPX1 is the lowest rating there is: it means vertical drips, not rain, and certainly not the Shinjuku downpour I walked through on Friday. But the previous PENs had no rating at all, and the viewfinder is the change that turns a camera you hold at arm's length into one you hold against your face. It is on the showroom floor at OM SYSTEM PLAZA in Shinjuku until the 21st, ahead of a late-October release. I went. The staff talk was full and nobody was under forty.

Ricoh made the GR IV's 30th anniversary kit official: 6,000 units worldwide, on sale 21 October, thirty years to the month after the film GR1. The specification is identical to the GR IV. You are paying for the number on the box, and 6,000 people will, and I do not think they are wrong. A GR is the camera photographers buy after they have sold the flagship.

The lens of the week is Sigma's 85mm F1.2 DG Art for E and L mounts, at 905 grams with two linear motors. F1.2 on an 85 is the aperture portrait photographers argued about for a decade and then mostly stopped, because the lenses weighed as much as a body. 905 grams is still heavy. It is also two hundred grams less than the last time somebody tried this, and that is the number to remember.

Nikon's week was split between cinema and housekeeping. Firmware 2.00 for the ZR adds Log3G10 and REDWideGamutRGB in H.265, which means the RED colour science can now travel in a file a laptop can play, plus focus peaking in R3D. Nine NIKKOR Z CINEMA T1.9 VV lenses are in development, VV being RED's larger-than-full-frame format, which is the clearest sign yet that Nikon bought RED to make lenses for RED sensors, not the other way round. And the Z8's firmware 3.11 fixes three bugs, two of them for people who tether. Camera Decision's question of the week was the right one: the ZR and the Z8 are 1,200 dollars apart and only one has a viewfinder. Same mount, same sealing, same missing mechanical shutter. If you shoot stills, the viewfinder is the 1,200 dollars.

And the toy. Fujifilm's instax Pal 2 is 87 grams, 10.7 megapixels, has a viewfinder and a screen this time, prints to an instax printer, and costs 169.99 euros from 29 September in Germany. My father kept a drawer of cameras nobody collected, and half of them were this: a small thing with a lens that a child could carry to school. I do not review toys. I do notice when a maker with a serious lens division bothers to give the toy a viewfinder.

So: no flagship. A body with stabilisation for people who could not afford it before, a compact you can finally hold to your eye, a lens that lost weight, a firmware that makes a big file smaller, and a 6,000-unit birthday. That is a week of tools, and tools are what this magazine is for.