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byThomReviewsAffinity Hits the iPad The free Affinity app, which includes near clones of Illustrator, Photoshop, and inDesign, has made it to iPadOS.

byThomReviewsAnother Thom Early Warning Just over a year ago I began warning about card and storage prices. I detected the early pattern that was developing where the AI players were beginning to gobble up any and every bit (pardon the…

byThomReviewsbyThom is New Again As part of my ongoing site updating, I’m happy to report that bythom.com is now operating from my new software—which I’ve called NewBox—and that has produced a wide variety of changes, even though…

byThomReviewsWill Fujifilm Wear Out the X Look? Here we go again. Today Fujifilm introduced the instax MiniEVO 2, yet another in their long line of instant cameras.

byThomReviewsSigma Reboots and Uppercases the fp Sigma today introduced the FP2, a complete redo of their earlier camera-in-a-small-box. The box is similar, losing just a bit of depth and only .2 ounces (6g) heavier.

byThomReviewsA Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Web Page... I know you’re all waiting for my site refreshes and the launch of byThom MAX. MAX is coming, but a funny thing happened along the way.

byThomReviewsTime’s Three Top Gadgets Not that Time Magazine is a particularly good arbitrator of design and innovation, but it was interesting as to what they picked as their top Consumer Electronic gadgets this year.

byThomReviewsCraft or Cruft? For the last two weeks I’ve been barraged by people asking me to comment on the appearance of the ArtCraft clones of Adobe and Microsoft products.

byThomReviewsProtecting Proprietary Platforms An interview with Kazuto Yamaki of Sigma that appeared in LensVid raised an interesting point. I wonder how many people caught it. " Sigma doesn’t use AI to design lenses, for now. Mr.

byThomReviewsTokyo Looks the Wrong Direction The camera makers weren’t ready for smartphones (again). That’s right, the smart folk in Tokyo have once again not been ready for something that was extremely predictable in the phone market.

byThomReviewsWhat’s With PetaPixel? PetaPixel came up with their “full-frame power rankings” on a recent podcast. For a group that has been accused of being not-entirely-Nikon-supportive, the list seriously contradicts that: Nikon Z8…

byThomReviewsSkip the Application, Use AI? Agentic AI is becoming somewhat a norm. Instead of you doing something directly, you tell your agent to do it and the thing is done indirectly. This is both useful and dangerous.

byThomReviewsI Was Wrong Back in 2011 I told Nikon executives that it was not useful to pursue a relationship with a phone maker. Others at the time, particularly Leica, were doing so.

byThomReviewsThe Thing About SKUs A comment on another site coupled with the upcoming holiday buying season led to this “explainer.” SKU is the abbreviation for Stocking Keeping Units, a shorthand for the number of physically…

byThomReviewsThe Nikon Z5IIC Week LEDE ON As you probably know, I teach photo workshops outside the US, and I talk to other photographers doing the same, as well as travel agencies trying to get my attention.

byThomReviewsThe Problem With Announcing Alone All the feedback I’ve gotten from readers about recent camera launches, particularly Nikon’s Z5IIC one, made me realize that the camera makers haven’t figured something out yet.

byThomReviewsA Little More Gets Announced LEDE ON The lede seems to never change now: expect price increases and product shortages for the foreseeable future.

byThomReviewsCameras and Lenses Appear (or Not) LEDE ON The announce-arrive cycle appears to be getting longer. It used to be that new product announcements meant the product was already on its way to, if not already in the backrooms of, retail…

byThomReviewsGet Ready for Change LEDE ON This week I write about new products, existing (Adobe), announced-but-not-imminent (Ricoh), and upcoming (additional new cameras coming in September).

byThomReviewsDrop Into Fall LEDE ON Turns out that September 1 was an important day, as prices changed for many items starting deep in the supply chain all the way up to finished products.

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