CamerAgX

10 stories

CamerAgXReviewsShooting film on the cheap – the impact on your style of photography Let’s assume you’re new to film photography. For a small budget, let’s say $25.00 including shipping and handling, you can: Buy a fixed focus, one time use or reusable camera, Be brave and buy an old…

11.03

CamerAgXReviewsThe Pentax 17 – a Holga without the light leaks? The Pentax 17 is an interesting camera – developed by a team of enthusiasts who did not want to make an “autofocus compact of the nineties” reedition, but were trying to bring a new generation of…

10.27

CamerAgXReviewsWhat could a future Pentax digital SLR look like? On September 6, Ricoh (the owner of the Pentax brand) published a communique, making the end of Pentax’s current line of dSLRs official, and vaguely announcing they were working on a new and…

10.06

CamerAgXReviewsThe Pentax MZ-3, or the final years of the mass market SLRs In 1999, Nikon launched the D1, their first entirely in house-designed dSLR. And in 2003, Canon introduced the first mass-market digital dSLR, the Rebel 300D.

09.15

CamerAgXReviewsCan an AI Chat app really compete with the scanners of a photo lab? We’ve seen that a general purpose AI program like ChatGPT can recommend Lightroom presets, and, if necessary, “reconstruct” a technically flawed image and transform it into a picture any photographer…

09.01

CamerAgXReviewsYour images, ChatGPT and the “highly plausible reconstruction” Last week, I was wondering how the files coming from a Frontier or Noritsu scan looked so much better than those I was getting when simply digitizing the negatives with a mirrorless camera.

08.25

CamerAgXReviewsAre the images you’ve scanned from film negatives really… yours? And how is an image produced by the Frontier or the Noritsu scanner of a photo lab really more “yours” than an image totally reconstructed by an AI program such as ChatGPT?

08.18

CamerAgXReviewsKodak Ektar H35 and the quest for the cheapest usable film camera A few weeks ago I entered a Five Below store and bought their finest reusable film camera , for $7.00. It works, but it’s not better than a disposable camera.

08.04

CamerAgXReviewsArgus M5600D – A generic long zoom “travel” compact film camera with an American household name You may have read about my recent experiences with the Five Below Reusable Camera (bought in store, new, for $7.00), and my quest for something a bit better, but in the same price range.

07.21

CamerAgXReviewsTesting Buyee.jp – a (cheaper) eBay alternative to tap the Japanese second hand equipment market? After years of gradual improvements, eBay has become a very reliable marketplace for buyers of second hand cameras and lenses.

07.07

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