Patent applications are always worth keeping an eye on for a hint of what might be coming down the pipeline from major manufacturers – and Canon has just filed an interesting one.

Patent JP 2026-132879 (P2026-132879A), just published by the Japanese Patent Office and reported by Japanese news outlet Asobinet, was filed by Canon and includes multiple lenses with a diffractive optical system that are designed for use with very small sensors – the kinds of sensors that are used in camera phones.

The three lenses themselves are listed as having focal lengths of 5.53mm, 6.79mm and 8.70mm, which on a smartphone sensor would work out to equivalent focal lengths of 45mm, 55mm and 70mm. The listed f-numbers for the three lenses are f/2.5, f/2.7 and f/2.9 respectively.

Naturally, patenting the lenses could mean any number of things. Personally I doubt that Canon is about to start producing its own smartphones, but it could be that the manufacturer is planning on releasing standalone lens attachments for smartphones.

Alternatively – and personally I think this is most likely – it could be that Canon is partnering up with a smartphone manufacturer to lend its tech to a handset’s camera module, the way that Leica does with Xiaomi phones like the Xiaomi 17 Ultra and Hasselblad does with the Oppo Find X9 Ultra.

Our own Gareth Bevan described the Oppo in particular as one of the best camera systems he had ever used on a phone.

I’d definitely be excited to see a smartphone come equipped with Canon camera tech – particularly if Canon’s excellent color science also arrived as part of the package!

Like many tech companies, Canon files patent applications all the time – indeed, it has actually been the Japanese company that files the most patents for more than two decades – and many of them never become released products.

Nevertheless, I’ll be keeping an eye on this one and will be interested to see whether anything more comes of it – after all, Canon has time and again shown itself to be a manufacturer that isn’t afraid to take risks and try new things.

You may also like…

Check out our roundups of the best Canon cameras and the best camera phones – and who knows, maybe one day soon we will see some crossover between the two?

Nikon has released a pair of firmware updates: one for the Nikon Coolpix P1000 bridge camera and another for the Nikon Z5 II entry-level mirrorless camera.

Firmware version 1.9 for the P1000 sorts a rare yet serious issue that would cause the camera to temporarily freeze when adjusting the zoom while in burst mode.

Firmware version 1.20 brings a host of updates to the Z5 II, including more versatile aperture control when recording video and a host of changes to the settings menus.

Nikon Firmware Downloads

Firmware version 1.20 (Nikon Z5II)

Firmware version 1.9 (Nikon Coolpix P1000)

It’s a good idea to hold off downloading the latest firmware for a few weeks. This should give enough time for any new issues to arise in community chatter, and for Nikon to address them. Keep an eye on Digital Camera World and we'll let you know about any problems.

Nikon hasn’t given any technical explanation as to why the Coolpix would freeze while zooming in burst mode. However, it’s thought that processor-heavy burst sequences could overwhelm the camera buffer, causing the device to stop responding.

Arguably, the two most practical updates to the Z5 II are the ability to save focus position to user settings and an extension of the ISO auto shutter-speed threshold.

The former enables your saved custom shooting modes (U1 / U2) to remember your preset focus distance, which is especially useful for tripod or fixed studio setups. The latter offers finer control over when the camera steps up ISO versus dropping the shutter speed, helping avoid unwanted motion blur when shooting handheld.

There’s also a new “auto-switch” option under the Setup menu, giving you more control over toggling between the rear LCD screen and viewfinder. And a new FTP inactivity timeout automatically manages idle connections to preserve battery life.

So, a major update for the Coolpix P1000, which will hopefully solve what was a serious issue for a small number of users. Whereas the Z5II gets a suite of tweaks which, together, could bolster workflows meaningfully.

You might also like…

Here’s our pick of the best Nikon cameras, and here’s our say on the best Nikon lenses for DSLR.

When it comes to videogames, there are two certainties in life: Guile's theme goes with everything and everything can play Doom.

From ATMs to calculators and even pregnancy tests, the groundbreaking MS-DOS videogame from 1993 has been played on what seems like every piece of technology. And now, the latest tech to answer the question "Can it play Doom?" is a DSLR that's over a quarter of a century old.

The Canon EOS 550D – known as the Rebel T2i in the US and the Kiss X4 in Japan – isn't just one of the best cameras for beginners; it's the best camera if you want to play one of the most iconic first-person shooters of all time.

While it was reported back in May that someone got Doom running on a Nikon Zf, there is some doubt online as to whether it was real or a sneaky bit of video playback.

However, the feat has been performed on the 550D using Magic Lantern – custom firmware developed in 2009 for Canon cameras that runs from a memory card and adds a host of features such as dual ISO, RGB histogram, zebras, new grids like the Fibonacci spiral… and now, the ability to run Doom, as you can see below:

Canon is always telling us how clever its Digic processors are, but I'll bet the company never envisioned that the Digic 4 chip in its 2010 camera would be used to run a videogame!

As you'd expect, the D-pad on the back of the camera is used to navigate while the SET button fires your weapon. The hack even employs the 550D's speaker to emit in-game audio and effects, which again is something I bet Canon's engineers could never have predicted.

According to Tom's Hardware, the developer said that the port only works on a Canon EOS 550D running firmware version 1.0.9, specifically noting, "Do not install this binary on another camera model or firmware version."

There are full instructions on how to install and run everything in the Tom's Hardware report, but I cannot stress strongly enough that Magic Lantern is a completely unofficial project and is in no way endorsed or supported by Canon.

In fact, running it could potentially brick your camera and also invalidates your warranty – so think carefully before you go blasting Martian monsters on your camera.

You might also like…

Take a look at the best Canon cameras along with the best Canon lenses for DSLRs and the best Canon RF lenses for mirrorless models.

The 2026 solar eclipse brought troves of viewers across the path of totality, many equipped with cameras and smartphones – but some viewers walked away with impossible photos that would only happen if the Earth happened to have two moons.

Several failed eclipse photos are making the rounds on the internet, where users snapping photos with a smartphone realized that the phone had "captured" what looks like the moon passing in front of…another moon.

Across Reddit and Twitter, several smartphone photographers have shared photos taken during the eclipse that turn the sun’s orange glow into what looks like the surface of the moon.

The culprit? Several posts – and one comparison between a handful of different smartphones – suggest that the impossible photo of the Moon blocking what looks like another Moon comes from the supermoon mode on the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, suggesting the use of AI-enhanced photography in the supermoon mode.

The smartphone’s supermoon mode uses computational photography to enhance photos of the moon. As one user on X described (translated from Spanish), “It detected a bright sphere in the sky, went into 'supermoon' mode, and straight up invented the entire surface.”

While enhancing the surface of the moon may be less obvious under a more typical scenario, photographing the eclipse requires using a protective filter, turning the sun into a dark orange orb. The mishap seems to be one of mistaken identity, misreading the sun as the moon when the moon was a dark shadow. The scenario isn't likely to pop up very often – after all, the 2026 eclipse was the first time mainland Spain has been in the path of totality since 1905.

Thankfully, the mode is something that can be turned off. Another user commented that disabling supermoon mode on the phone fixed the issue and returned the photos to the expected solar eclipse shots.

I find the gaff rather humorous, though admittedly it would have been frustrating to experience. After all, why take the time out of a celestial phenomenon that only lasts for a few minutes to take a photo that AI could generate anyway?

The viral posts over the glitch echo a similar controversy from a few years back when Samsung users found that the camera was enhancing the texture of the moon.

As a photographer, the viral posts over the supermoon mode eclipse mishap illustrate why generative AI doesn’t belong inside cameras.

Standard AI already powers excellent camera features like subject detection and autofocus. But generative AI, where a computer is creating something that’s not there, shouldn’t be trusted inside the devices that capture memories.

You may also like

Take a look at these telephoto shots that enlarge the eclipse, or NASA's top shots of the 2026 solar eclipse.

It’s been a bit of a rough month for smart camera glasses like the Ray-Ban Metas.

While this tech has been gathering a lot of hype and interest of late, it has also suffered a number of damaging PR scandals after stories have emerged of camera glasses being used to stalk and harass women in spaces like offices and gyms.

It has given rise to an unfortunate nickname for the tech – ‘pervert glasses’ – that is beginning to stick.

The tech’s increased notoriety is having predictable consequences. In the UK, where I live, the glasses have been banned in all judicial buildings (such as courtrooms and their surroundings), as well as in the popular pub chain Wetherspoons, which operates more than 800 venues across the country, and at Comic-Con UK following incidences of non-consensual filming.

All this has me wondering – can the tech recover its reputation at this point or is it too far gone?

Those of a certain age will recall the infamous 2011 launch of Google Glass, a pair of proto-smart glasses that were essentially mocked into oblivion, with its users dubbed ‘glassholes’. Meta glasses and their imitators have proved more tenacious, but the ‘pervert glasses’ moniker could ultimately prove just as fatal.

Granted, manufacturers can’t always control what users do with their products. Smartphones and regular cameras have certainly been used to harass people and take non-consensual photos, and nobody’s suggesting banning them. However, camera glasses just make it so easy – and to my mind, manufacturers are not convincingly demonstrating that they care.

Recently I reviewed the Rokid AI Glasses Style for DCW – they’re essentially a copy of the Meta version using a combination of Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT rather than Meta AI. I enjoyed using them and was genuinely impressed by the tech, but something I had difficulty getting past was how lackluster the privacy features are.

The white LED designed to alert others to the fact that you’re recording is dim, unobtrusive and easy to miss – I’m going to guess that not a single person I passed while testing them at London’s Kew Gardens noticed it.

The glasses are also supposed to stop recording if the privacy light is blocked, but I tested this and… they don’t. They play an automated message in your ears, notifying that the light is blocked, but recording continues.

If you’ll forgive me for quoting myself, what I said at the time was: "[camera glasses] tech is never going to shake its reputation for irresponsible use when manufacturers make irresponsible use so easy."

The recording light on Meta Glasses, too, is white (not red) and fairly unobtrusive, and it is difficult to think of non-pervert explanations for why this is the case.

The firm's quiet embedding of a facial-recognition system in its glasses platform also garnered unwelcome attention – and the company backed down and removed it after public outrage. Now, I can think of non-pervert reasons why this tech might be useful in a pair of camera glasses – but the pervert ones do spring to mind more readily, don't they?

Meta is committed to its camera glasses and other manufacturers are following suit, with Apple and Google planning to launch their own intelligent eyewear later this year.

All I can say is: they should be careful. This backlash is not going away any time soon and, unless these manufacturers can seriously demonstrate their commitment to preventing their products being used for nefarious purposes, that ‘pervert glasses’ nickname is going to keep on sticking.

You may also like...

Our guides to the best camera glasses and the best wearable cameras.

Meta has found itself in hot water thanks to growing concerns about the privacy implications surrounding the Meta Glasses with built in cameras. Apple is planning on putting cameras into AirPods, but solving privacy by not using the cameras to take photos or video.

What is it for then? Apple's integration of cameras into AirPods is designed he process might be quite advanced, as the leaking of this promo video – doing the rounds everywhere today – shows.

The video in the tweet shows Siri's upcoming "visual intelligence" feature, so the cameras are helping it see the world around the user but not being used to record images, which (arguably) solves privacy concerns.

It certainly would silence the immediate worries of many about capturing photos and video by stealth.

Except, well, there is a bit of a problem.

Firstly the video, leaked by @Aaron, doesn't appear to feature the same camera lenses seen in some other rumor images? Is it a fake? That'd be my immediate suspicion were it not for the fact that the video has been reposted online by probably the most famous Apple rumor merchant, Mark Gurman (see his re-post on x.com here).

That lends a degree of credibility. Not only that, but according to Gurman and other sources, Apple has been investigating these privacy issues and perhaps even delayed its own Meta-like glasses as a result.

These were internally codenamed N50, but Apple has had to face the reality that courts in New York, among others, have established bans (not to mention some casinos). It's also true, of course, that the Apple Vision Pro goggles don't seem likely to win the mainstream market.

AirTags were once also associated with stalking – privacy-related publicity seems like an area Apple is keen to avoid, even if it means being slow to the mark in this fast-growing category.

All of which adds up to Apple wanting to get a product out in this growing space, but having good reasons not to get involved in ongoing privacy debates. So, in short, restricting access to cameras to the AI and not a camera app makes sense.

It also, of course, sidesteps any discussion about image quality from such a small device.

Will the cameras actually see the world well from the ear? That'll be another question for another day...

As well as Meta, other brands are releasing glasses. Google is expected to this fall, featuring Gemini integration, built by Samsung and powered by Qualcomm chips. They will bear no relation to the Google Glass I wasted my money on to be part of the future in 2013!

A new study carried out by the folks behind an AI-powered photo editing software has found that the vast majority of its users don’t like the way its AI adjusts photos, often leaving creators with an “unnatural” final result.

The survey was carried out by Skylum, the parent company of Luminar, which found that, of 1,328 survey respondents, 76% who use Luminar on their smartphones dial back the AI suggestions to create a more “authentic” feel.

What’s more, according to the data, 93% of respondents, whom Skylum has defined simply as “photographers,” said they want results that look “natural.”

I don’t think this study reveals anything starkly different to what the photography community already feels towards AI in general: that part of the problem with the technology is that it can create results that just don’t feel right.

But I do think the study highlights that there is an acceptance within the community to use AI in post-production, as long as it doesn’t edit images in a way that you wouldn’t.

After all, 73% of respondents said staying “natural” mattered more to them than looking “flawless,” while only 39% of respondents said they hold back from AI editing altogether, which leads me to believe that photographers want the time-saving benefits of AI without feeling like AI has taken the reins.

Skylum also said that 80% of respondents would rather a photo captures “feeling” than “technical details”, which I guess does allude to a new insight that there may be a general feeling among photographers that AI oversharpens images, for example. However, that’s my take, as the company didn’t clarify what “technical details” meant.

I think the overall takeaway here is that, among Luminar users at least, there’s no issue with using AI, as long as it edits images in a way that reflects what they actually saw when pressing the shutter – and that the final result doesn’t deviate from the creative vision they had.

You might also like…

Here’s our roundup of the best AI image generators as well as our take on the best photo editing software.

After a long series of teasers, the first smartphone to come from the partnership between cinema camera maker ARRI and Chinese mobile phone brand Honor is here – but the unusual Honor Robot Phone may be just the start of the collaboration.

Unveiled on August 12, the much-teased Honor Robot Phone has an unusual camera design: a folding gimbal that sits at the top of the phone. That gimbal camera powers steadier video, but also tricks like following subjects as they move and stitching three photos together for a wider group shot. The gimbal even has a party trick – it can dance if you ask the Yoyo AI assistant.

That gimbal houses a 200MP telephoto camera and a 50MP wide-angle camera. There’s a 50MP selfie camera too, though the gimbal can turn the camera around as far as 300 degrees.

The gimbal tucks away into the back of the phone when not in use, despite still being under 10mm (0.37 inches) thick. Weather resistance is still part of the Robot Phone’s design – though not as much as some devices, and the camera needs to be tucked away to earn the IP54 rating.

Beyond the camera’s unusual gimbal design, cinema camera maker ARRI’s influence is evident. The Robot Phone uses ARRI color science, but the brands say the colors were rebuilt specifically for a smartphone’s smaller sensors and optics.

Integrating ARRI camera tech into a smartphone puts capture and editing in the same device. The camera captures 10-bit ARRI Log C3, allowing for more highlight and shadow detail, while Looks and Wide Gamut 3 help boost color edits.

The Honor Robot Phone, however, has so far only been announced in China – availability in additional countries has not yet been released, and Honor does not currently have a presence in the US. Regardless, the unusual design is eye-catching.

The two brands' partnership points to the potential for further collaborations down the road.

“The companies’ joint imaging technology lab is exploring further developments in three areas: sensor-level optics and dynamic range; end-to-end cinema industry workflows from capture through postproduction; and imaging realism and aesthetic standards in the era of AI,” the announcement reads. “As part of this ongoing work, the companies will continue to refine and advance the integrated imaging technologies.”

In China, the Robot phone costs 9,999 RMB, which is about $1,483 / £1,099 / AU$2,100.

You may also like

Take a look at the best smartphones for photography, or dive into gimbal cameras like the DJI Pocket 4 or the Insta360 Luna Ultra.

Google has just unveiled the latest Pixel camera phones – the Pixel 11, Pixel 11 Pro and Pixel 11 Pro XL – with promises including "major camera upgrades", Google's "fastest, most powerful chip" and, of course, lots of AI.

There's also a new, one-swipe Magic Capture mode "which catches the moment while you live it".

In terms of the cameras, the Google Pixel 11 boasts a larger 48MP main sensor (1/1.56-inch) that the company claims will deliver 56% more light sensitivity. The 5x telephoto lens takes advantage of the new Tensor G6 processor to deliver 30x Super Zoom.

The Google Pixel 11 Pro and Pro XL likewise get a brand new sensor in the main 50MP camera (1/1.3-inch) that is claimed to be "Pixel's best camera yet". The 48MP telephoto also gets a larger sensor (1/1.95-inch) with 30% more light sensitivity and Portrait Mode at up to 5x, with up to 120x Pro Zoom.

The Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold gets upgrades that appear to be in line with the base Pixel 11, in the form of a new 48MP main camera (1/1.56-inch) and up to 30x Super Zoom.

Google Pixel 11 series camera specs

What is Magic Capture on Google Pixel 11 phones?

New to the Pixel 11 generation is Magic Capture mode, "which catches the moment while you live it".

According to Google, "You don’t have to stress out over perfectly timed shutter taps, or stare at your viewfinder the whole time you’re capturing content. With one tap, get a video and high-quality photos which are share-ready, thanks to automatic cropping and unblurring."

Google does, however, point out in the small print that "results may vary".

Also new this year is Camera Looks, which enables you to "create your own set of distinct, professional-grade film styles and unique photo aesthetics, so you can take HDR+ photos that feel true to you.

"Developed with Pixel’s Real Tone philosophy in mind, Camera Looks ensures that even with highly stylised or personalised effects, we still deliver consistent, equitable results across all skin tones."

All four phones are available for pre-order now, with an August 20 official on-sale date. Prices start at $899 / £879 for the Pixel 11, $1,099 / £1,079 for the Pixel 11 Pro, $1,299 / £1,279 for the Pixel 11 Pro XL and $1,899 / £1,799 for the Pixel 11 Pro Fold (international pricing to follow).

You might also like…

See how the new Pixels compare to the best camera phones and the best iPhones for photography.

Leica has rolled out a slew of firmware updates for a host of its cameras.

Firmware version 4.1.1 for the Leica Q3, Q3 43 and Q3 Monochrom forms the meat of the news, while smaller and seemingly less important updates have been rolled out for the Leica SL2 and SL2-S along with the D-Lux 8.

The company hasn't gone too in-depth with the details but, from what I can gather, the Q3 cameras get important fixes for bugs affecting auto-shutdown and remote app control, while the SL2 models and D-Lux 8 see their operational stability bolstered.

Leica firmware downloads

Here are the firmware downloads, all of which I’ll explain below:

Download firmware 4.1.1 (Leica Q3 / Q3 43 / Q3 Monochrom)

Download Firmware 1.9.0 (Leica D-Lux 8)

Download firmware 6.3.0 (Leica SL2 and Leica SL2-S)

It’s a good idea to hold off downloading the latest firmware for a few weeks. This should give enough time for any new issues to arise in community chatter, and for Leica to address them. Keep an eye on Digital Camera World and we'll let you know about any problems.

Firmware 4.1.1 (Leica Q3 / Q3 43 / Q3 Monochrom)

The Leica Q3 series brings high-end, full-frame compact digital cameras known for their solid build quality, 60MP sensor, and fixed prime lenses. Firmware 4.1.1 brings a trio of main updates for these cameras:

• A fix for a bug preventing the camera from turning off automatically during wireless charging in “certain situations”. Leica hasn’t elaborated on what these are, but has confirmed the Q3 models now turn off automatically as soon as wireless charging is detected.
• A fix for a bug causing the camera to unexpectedly switch to the default user profile in “certain situations”. Again, we don't know what the exact situations were, but if you were facing it, Leica says the issue is now resolved.
• A fix for a bug causing Bluetooth connection failure between the Leica Fotos mobile app and a Q3 camera after a remote wake-up with certain Leica Looks (in-camera profiles) or AF mode settings applied. Leica hasn’t clarified which Looks or AF settings were triggering the error.

Firmware 1.9.0 (Leica D-Lux 8)

The Leica D-Lux 8 is a premium pocket-sized compact camera featuring a 17MP Micro Four Thirds sensor and a fast 24–75mm equivalent f/1.7–2.8 zoom lens.

Leica says that the latest firmware fixes existing “bugs in the firmware” without going into any details whatsoever. This is likely a routine firmware update to maintain stability.

Firmware 6.3.0 (Leica SL2 and Leica SL2-S)

The Leica SL2 and Leica SL2-S are full-frame mirrorless rigs sharing the same weather-sealed metal body and in-body image stabilization, but featuring different sensor resolution, speed, and video capabilities.

Leica hasn’t published release notes for firmware version 6.3.0, so we don’t actually know what the update entails. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for any new information and update this article accordingly.

You might also like…

Our in-house Leica expert, Seb Oakley, has out together his pick of the best Leica cameras. He knows more than a few things about these rigs, so you're in trusted hands!

ChatGPT can now use more than 70 different tools from Adobe apps like Photoshop, Lightroom, and Premiere without leaving the chatbot, thanks to a new Adobe plugin in ChatGPT.

Announced on August 06, the Adobe plugin allows ChatGPT users to type prompts across photos, videos, and designs, then allow the AI to run an Adobe-powered workflow without leaving the AI program.

The move builds on previously released tools by bringing more than 70 different tools using a plug-in for the AI. The plug-in is designed for ChatGPT’s more advanced Work and Codex, two components of the ChatGPT desktop app.

Adobe explains that the plugin allows users to upload multiple photos, describe the look they want, then get a consistently styled edit across the entire set of images, with the collection saved to the Creative Cloud.

For videos, the plugin can help build a short highlight video from a longer project, along with resizing videos to fit different social media platforms.

The plugin also works with Adobe apps beyond photo and video, including Acrobat for building PDFs as well as InDesign and Illustrator for graphic design.

“The Adobe plugin in ChatGPT isn’t a replacement for our flagship apps that creative professionals rely on every day,” said Forest Key, vice president of Adobe Firefly & Agentic AI at Adobe. “It brings Adobe’s trusted, pro-grade creative and productivity tools into the flow of conversation, so more people can create high-quality content the moment inspiration strikes. Our flagship apps go deeper when projects call for hands-on precision and creative control. Together, they give more people more ways to create with Adobe.”

Adobe says that the plug-in uses the same trusted tools found inside Adobe apps and, when users need a tool not found inside the plug-in, a partially finished edit can be opened inside Photoshop for further adjustments.

ChatGPT users first need to open the ChatGPT app, navigate to plugins, then find and install the Adobe plugin. After installation, users can use “@Adobe” to tell the chatbot to work within the Adobe ecosystem.

Logged-in Adobe account holders will have access to more generative capabilities as well as Creative Cloud file storage, but Adobe notes that guests can use the tool without signing in as well.

The Adobe ChatGPT plug-in is rolling out globally from August 06.

You may also like

Take a look at the best photo editing software, or the best monitors for photo editing.

Think DSLRs are dead? Not quite, even in 2026. Nikon may have moved firmly into the mirrorless era, but it hasn't forgotten its high-end DSLRs.

Nikon's D780 and flagship D6 are both six-year-old full-frame DSLRs, but both have just received new firmware updates that fix a handful of exposure-related bugs.

There are no flashy new features here, but it's a reassuring sign that Nikon is still ironing out the quirks of these older DSLRs.

Firmware overview

Nikon D780
Ver 1.21 – Download link for Windows and Mac OS

Nikon D6
Ver. 1.71 – Download link for Windows and Mac OS

Improvements

Nikon D780
• Fixed an issue where photos taken would sometimes be underexposed when zoom was adjusted during burst photography in high-speed continuous release mode

Nikon D6
Fixed the following issues:
• Photos taken would sometimes be underexposed with a D-type lens attached
• Recalling shooting functions would sometimes limit the shutter speed to 1/250 s with auto FP high-speed sync

Pro Advice

If you caught Episode 4 of Bokeh Face: Digital Camera World podcast, above, we discussed the best time to install firmware updates, why they matter, and what issues they can cause. It's a helpful listen if you're unsure when – or whenever – you should update.

It's smart to wait a week or two after release to see if any users hit snags. In the past, brands have had a few hiccups with major updates – for instance, introducing memory-setting bugs or minor interface glitches before being reissued.

You might like...

Browse the best Nikon cameras, the best Nikon lenses for DSLRs, the best Nikon telephoto lenses, and the best Nikon portrait lenses.

Last week the media was in uproar about a major photography gallery in Belfast, Northern Ireland, displaying AI-generated images in an exhibition.

In fact, the chief executive of the Belfast Exposed gallery, the institution under fire, recently defended the decision in a BBC article, as did the creator of the images, Johnny Sheridan, a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) graduate from Ulster University.

I’m sure many of you would scoff at Sheridan's defiantly saying that creating imagery using AI takes “far more than pressing a button,” but I agree with him. Even as a photographer who dislikes generative AI for all sorts of reasons which I won’t get into in this piece, I have to admit that Sheridan is right.

In my view, there’s a huge difference between simply “pressing a button” and articulating a creative prompt that conveys your vision effectively, so much so that an AI is able to bring to life an idea that existed in your mind, just as if you designed it yourself with a tool like Photoshop.

I don’t know about you, but I see using AI and graphic design, or any other type of creative visuals, as different approaches to the same goal. This doesn’t mean I’m OK with generative AI – I still hate the thought of using it to create images to my bones. But, as a creative, I have to acknowledge that going back and forth with an AI until it renders your idea as you envisioned is a form of creativity.

Now I’m not saying that Sheridan’s images are the best example of this. Admittedly, the bizarre creations, which supposedly convey undertones of anti-misogyny, seem more like dystopian takes on the Kill Bill films. You’ll know what I mean when you look at them and see the woman’s yellow outfit.

Perhaps Sheridan’s AI tool even referenced Kill Bill when creating the scenes, which brings up another thought I recently pondered: AI movie awards celebrating creations that might have infringed on copyrighted content.

But my point is that Sheridan is absolutely right when he says that AI imagery can be much more than button pushing. And while his work might not be the best example of this, I have seen plenty of AI-generated videos in particular that are, and it’s mainly because of the human who prompted the AI.

Hopefully this doesn’t read as a defense of generative AI. It’s not, and I want generative AI to disappear just as quickly as it took the world by storm. But right now we’re talking about recognizing the use of AI as a legitimate form of creativity, not simply button pushing, to which I say it can be.

You might also like…

Here's our rundown of the best AI image generators, or, if you prefer, here’s our pick of the best photo editing software to add the finishing touches to your human-crafted images.

A lightweight 130g prime has just received a free firmware update that promises faster autofocus (AF) and fixes an issue that could prevent continuous AF from working correctly during video recording on some camera models.

The SG-Image AF 25mm f/1.8 Micro Four Thirds (MFT) gets firmware Ver. 1.1, with the update specifically targeting AF performance. While the lens is available in several mounts, including Sony E, Fujifilm X, and Nikon Z, this particular update is for the MFT version.

For photographers and videographers using the compact budget prime, the update should make focusing more responsive while addressing a potentially frustrating AF-C issue when shooting video.

New firmware Ver. 1.1

SG-image AF 25mm f/1.8 Micro Four Thirds
Ver. 1.1 – Download link

Improvements
- Improved AF (autofocus) speed
- Fixed an issue where continuous autofocus (AF-C) might not function correctly during video recording on some models

SG-Image on how to update your lens
1) Download it to your computer
2) Link your lens to your computer through the USB-C port on its side, and it should show on your computer as "SG-image"
3) Copy and paste the firmware from your computer to your lens, and that's it

There is a txt file on the lens that shows the firmware version and its release date. It should show the firmware version you upgraded it to.

Pro Advice

If you caught Episode 4 of Bokeh Face: Digital Camera World podcast, above, we discussed the best time to install firmware updates, why they matter, and what issues they can cause. It's a helpful listen if you're unsure when – or whenever – you should update.

It's smart to wait a week or two after release to see if any users hit snags. In the past, brands have had a few hiccups with major updates – for instance, introducing memory-setting bugs or minor interface glitches before being reissued.

You might like...

Browse the best Micro Four Thirds cameras, and the best Micro Four Thirds lenses.

Samsung just launched its latest foldable phones, and alongside the usual Flip and Fold formats, there's a new, shorter, wider model, shaped a lot like a passport. Somewhat confusingly, it's just called the Galaxy Z Fold 8, while the traditional book-style foldable is now called the Fold 8 Ultra.

This new foldable sits in the middle of the lineup; it's more premium than the Flip 8, but the cameras aren't quite as advanced as the Ultra model. Samsung reckons it's the model to choose if you're all about content consumption, but that doesn't mean it can't make content, too.
The Z Fold 8 might lack a telephoto camera, but it has some surprisingly advanced features for photography and video. There's RAW shooting, a Log profile, and the fancy new APV codec - to name but a few. Plus, by all accounts, it seems to be the same shape that Apple's first foldable will adopt, so it might be a taste of things to come. I've been using it for the past week to find out what it's like to live with.

Specifications

Price & Availability

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 is up for pre-order now, and it's expected to land on store shelves and with customers around August 7th (at least in the UK).

There are three versions to choose from. The base model comes with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for £1699 / $1899, there's a 12GB+512GB version for £1869 / $2099, and a 16GB+1TB model that will set you back a whopping £2119 / $2499.

It's available in Graphite, Cream and Lavender as standard, with a rather fetching Pistachio colourway exclusive to Samsung's online and retail stores.

Design

The Galaxy Z Fold 8 is unlike any phone I have used before. It's almost exactly passport-sized, and while other devices have toyed with this form factor before (like the OnePlus Open and the original Pixel Fold), I think this one is noticeably shorter and more compact.

It immediately sparks excitement and intrigue; everyone who sees it is desperate to have a go with it. And that makes sense, as phones, even foldables, have become quite homogeneous, and this stands out as something truly unique (for now),

Aside from the shape, though, the Fold 8 retains Samsung's signature look. It has sharp corners, just like the last few Folds, flat edges, and the classic traffic-light-style camera layout (with one less camera). The front is covered with a flat pane of Gorilla Glass Ceramic 3, while the back is made from Gorilla Glass Victus 2, with a smooth matte finish.

Just like last year's Fold 7, the Fold 8 is impressively skinny. It measures just 4.3mm thick when unfolded, and 9.7mm when closed. It's also very lightweight, tipping the scales at 210g. This means it's lighter than the S26 Ultra, and not too much thicker, either.

One of the more subtle changes is that Samsung has added a new bevelled edge and changed something about the magnets to make the new foldables easier to open. It's almost impossible to notice, visually, but the difference is very noticeable in practice.

The crease has also been greatly reduced thanks to a new display manufacturing technique that incorporates a flexible titanium layer. When viewed head-on, you can barely notice the crease at all, and you'll barely feel it with your fingers, either.

To make matters even better, the screen is far less shiny, so you won't get as many distracting reflections. I was a little concerned that the less-shiny screen would be a fingerprint magnet (as they often are), but this one fares well. It might not be quite as smudge-resistant as the Fold 7, but I think it's a fine tradeoff overall.

Both screens are brighter than ever, now able to reach 3000 nits at peak, which makes them very easy to see outdoors. However, it's worth noting that the Z Fold 8 dims both displays to prevent overheating, and with the recent spate of hot weather in the UK, that happened to me a lot, which was quite frustrating.

The best thing about these screens is the aspect ratios. The cover display is 16:10, a lot like a laptop screen (when held horizontally), while the inner display is 4:3, like a retro TV or an iPad Mini. Usually, foldable phones give you a pretty normal phone shape when folded shut, and open into an almost-square shape, so this feels extremely unique.

It means that there's a very big difference using the foldable screen in portrait or landscape mode, and the experience is much closer to a traditional tablet screen. Held vertically, it's amazing for watching TikToks, browsing websites and reading ebooks or comics, and horizontally, it's excellent for watching YouTube, movies and gaming.

My favourite thing to do with the 4:3 screen is watch old TV shows and skate videos, as they're natively 4:3 and fill the entire display. For the same reason, it's also perfect for emulating old game consoles from the SNES to the PS2. It's also great for reviewing images, as a lot of cameras shoot 4:3, so it has the same benefit.

16:9 content is also great, as the black bars are much smaller than they are on a traditional folding phone. However, don't go into this thinking the screen will be significantly larger than a book-style fold, because the actual size of the content is about the same - it just takes up more of the screen.

The cover display is more of a mixed experience. It's adorably tiny, and some apps look great on it, while others can feel a little cramped.

Typing is the most divisive thing about it. The on-screen keyboard takes up about half the screen when it pops up, and if you're using both hands, it feels excellent. It's significantly wider than normal, which makes it much easier to type on. The flip side of that is that typing with one hand is pretty challenging, especially if you have smaller hands. It's a real stretch to reach the left side of the screen, and that can get tiresome.

Camera Performance

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 only has two cameras on the rear. There's a 50MP 23mm equivalent with an f /1.8 lens and a 1/1.56-inch sensor, and a 50MP ultrawide with an f/1.9 lens and a 1/2.51-inch sensor. Each screen also gets a 10MP punch-hole selfie camera, but the one on the folding screen has a wider FOV than the cover selfie camera.

Obviously, the biggest downside to this configuration is the lack of a telephoto camera. Natively, you can choose from a wide shot or an even wider shot, and that feels extremely limiting. Of course, there is digital zoom, but you can't go much past 4x before seeing an obvious drop in image quality. It maxes out at 10x, and doesn't look great when you go that far.

Photos taken on this phone have the signature Samsung look to them. They're very sharp, with natural colours and a pronounced HDR effect. They seem inoffensive by design; they'll rarely exceed your expectations, but they'll rarely let you down. It's essentially the polar opposite approach to the Honor Magic V6 that I tested recently.

I like my photos to have a little more personality than the default look delivers, but thankfully, that's not hard to achieve. You can either play with the built-in filters, which are all highly customisable, or you can shoot RAW and process the images as you see fit.

Daylight photography is where this device shines, and despite wide apertures and fresh imaging pipelines, low light is still a weak point. In fairness, nighttime images are well exposed and don't require super-long exposures, but they're pretty grainy compared to the competition.

The selfie cameras are decent enough, but they're not going to knock your socks off. I like how wide the internal selfie camera is; it's well suited to video calls, and that's likely how it'll be used most often.

The portrait blur effects are quite reliable, which adds to the appeal, but with a device like this, you can easily use the rear cameras and get some genuine background softness from the larger sensors.

When it comes to video shooting, I was pleasantly surprised by the wealth of options available. The Fold 8 has a Pro Video mode, complete with Log recording options, audio meters and APV codec support. Samsung is one of the few brands offering PAL recording formats in its default camera app, too. So if you need to shoot at 25p or 50p, it's all right here.

You can shoot at up to 8K30 on both rear cameras, and the main camera can shoot 4K120 for some buttery-smooth slow-motion shots. As ever, the stabilisation is solid, and the microphones are very decent, too.

Samsung also gives you some fun new video tools to play with. There's full 360 horizontal lock, just like we saw on the S26 Ultra, and a new dual-video recording mode that lets you capture your face and your surroundings at the same time.

The FanCam mode is particularly novel. If you have a wide shot, you can select a subject in the frame, and the software will automatically crop in and follow this person about in an aspect ratio of your choosing. I don't have a particular need for this feature, but I suppose it's an alternative to having a gimbal follow you about when shooting solo.

Phone Performance

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 has the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 inside, and it's a specially tuned "for Galaxy" version. If you opt for the 256GB or 512GB version, you'll get 12GB of RAM, while only the pricey 1TB variant gets 16GB of RAM. I have the 12+256GB model in for testing.

For the most part, the Z Fold 8 is as powerful as its specs suggest. Apps open quickly, multitasking is a breeze, and it'll run almost any game you throw at it. Popular titles like Genshin Impact are very well optimised on this device, but newer, heavier titles like Wuthering Waves pose more of a challenge.

To play at 60fps on the folding display, I had to lower the graphics preset to "balanced", and even on this setting, the frame rate would often dip to the low 40s. It's perfectly playable like this, and still looks good, but with my other 8 Elite Gen 5 foldables (like the Oppo Find N6) I am able to bump up the graphics settings a couple of notches and achieve similar performance.

I believe it's all due to thermal throttling. The Fold 8 has plenty of power on tap, but there's much less surface area to dissipate the heat, so it has to rein itself in. It's all the more disappointing because games scale so much better to this 4:3 screen than they do on other foldables.

Of course, this only matters if you're trying to play graphically demanding games. Most mobile games will run perfectly, and if you're into retro emulation, you're going to have a field day with this 4:3 screen.

Samsung has finally started experimenting with silicon battery tech, and as a result, the Z Fold 8 gets a bigger battery than the Fold 7, despite being significantly smaller. It's now 4800 mAh, up from 4400 mAh, and it charges faster, 45W with a wire and 25W wirelessly.

These figures don't sound too impressive, with Chinese brands touting 100W+ speeds and 6000mAh+ packs, but the reality is better than you'd expect. For instance, I found that the Fold 8 could go from 0 to 70% charged in just half an hour - keeping pace with the 80W Honor Magic V6.

The battery was also good enough to last me through the day with ease. I had to charge it every night without fail, but considering how often I was using the larger folding display and how many photos I was taking, that's a very good showing.

As for the software, Samsung hasn't rewritten the formula with its latest updates, so it'll look and feel very familiar if you've used a recent Samsung flagship.

The things I love are all still present, like the customisation options, the smooth, speedy animations and the slick default look, but the downsides are still there, too. My main issue with One UI is that it feels cluttered, as it comes loaded with all of Samsung's first-party apps and most of Google's, too. A lot of these apps serve the same purpose, which can make things confusing and messy.

The update I'm most excited about is the ability to run three apps side-by-side in split-screen mode. It really takes advantage of the wider format screen, and it turns this pocket-friendly device into a productivity powerhouse.

There's also a new app from Google called Notebook, which allows you to upload almost any kind of media: audio, video, PDF documents, etc. Then you can generate audio summaries, infographics, or just chat with Gemini about the contents. It seems to be a rebranding of Google's web-based Notebook LM, but it's a handy tool, and it's now easier to access.

There are, however, a few areas where One UI doesn't feel like it's fully optimised for this new shape. The one that bugs me the most is that it will only allow four apps on each row on the homescreen. Weirdly, the home row can have five. Every Samsung phone I have used, even relatively narrow ones like the Fold 7, allows for more apps on the grid, so I have no idea why this wider display is so restricted.

Another annoyance is that your apps change positions when you rotate from horizontal to vertical on the main display, and you can't add apps to the homescreen when it's held vertically. It's a minor issue, but when you're used to your apps being in a certain order, it can be quite frustrating.

I'm sure Samsung will iron out these issues before long, and it has plenty of time to do so, as this phone should receive updates and security patches for the next seven years.

Final Verdict

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 is one of the most interesting phones I have tested in recent years. And while rumours say there will be many more like it in the near future, for now, this is a wholly unique experience.

It's really fun to use, and the new shape has some tangible benefits, especially for content consumption and gaming. The cameras, though, aren't too special, and the lack of a telephoto is hard to deal with - especially at a price like this. I do wonder if the novelty will wear off and the small frustrations will begin to overshadow the fun that this shape brings - but after using it for a week, that hasn't happened yet.

As ever, whether or not you should buy this phone all comes down to your personal needs. I'm a photographer who enjoys playing graphically intensive games, so it's probably not the ideal device for me, but the shape shows real promise.

If you don't have such high performance demands, and you're just looking for a compact phone that can extend to give you a big screen experience, you will almost certainly fall in love with this device.

Alternatives

We're fast approaching the 25th anniversary of the camera phone, at least in the West. Sure, the first commercially available camera phone - the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210 - launched in 1999, but that was a Japan-only product. It wasn't until late 2001 that Nokia announced its first camera phone - the 7650 - and Europe got its first look at a digital camera packed into a mobile phone.

This was seriously cutting-edge kit. Standalone digital cameras were still in their infancy in 2001, with it being a couple more years until sales of digital cameras would overtake film. So to have a digital camera built into a svelte slider phone must have seemed almost worthy of something Q might give to James Bond.

The quality of the 7650's camera was never going to compete with a half-decent digital point-and-shoot of the era, as it had to make do with a VGA (0.3MP, 640 x 480 pixels) sensor, but it was the novel ability to have a camera with you wherever you went that set the 7650 apart.

And the cost to be at the bleeding edge of mobile imaging? 600 Euros, or around 1000 Euros in today's money. That might sound pretty reasonable in comparison to the cost of a flagship phone today, but for perspective, the legendary Nokia 3310 would have cost roughly one quarter of the price at the time.

This 2001 BBC news report covered the phone's announcement, but it wasn't only the camera hardware that made the 7650 special. Nokia didn't just want you to snap photos with the phone; it also wanted you to share them. Of course, this was years before social media and internet-based instant messaging services, so the only way you’d be able to wirelessly send photos (beyond line-of-sight infrared transfer) was using the (then) new MMS service.

The Multimedia Messaging Service was devised as an upgrade to existing SMS tech and meant that it wouldn’t just be text messages that could be sent between phones; you’d also be able to send photos. However, while the future was bright back then, the sun hadn't quite risen above the horizon for the mass sharing of camera phone images.

I was 16 in 2001, and therefore exactly in the demographic that had made SMS so popular. Back then in the UK a single 140-character text message cost 10 pence to send, and we would try our hardest to ruin the English language in order to send as much information as possible within that 140-character limit. Conversations that read like 'U gota d8 w/ ur gf l8r?' became standard between teens in the early 2000s, such was the financial constraints placed upon us by the strictly limited phone credit at our disposal (go just 1 character over that 140 limit and you're paying twice as much - the jeopardy was real!). Now consider that a single MMS would cost around three times the price of one SMS, while also requiring you and your recipient to both have compatible high-end handsets, and you can appreciate why the industry experts featured in that 2001 BBC report didn't expect the camera phone and instant picture messaging to take off straight away. In my personal experience, it wasn't really until 3G-capable phones and internet-based messaging took off in the late 2000s that mobile image sharing became commonplace, as there was no longer a specific cost associated with sending a photo between phones.

So next time you’re casually sharing a snap in Instagram or WhatsApp, remember that at the start of the millennium most would have thought that was science fiction.

Panasonic Lumix has released a free firmware update for four of its S-series lenses, including the lens that launched as the "world’s smallest and lightest full-frame compatible zoom."

The updates bring new focus-ring controls and other improvements to the L-mount zooms, covering everything from ultra-wide shooting to superzoom and telephoto photography.

The lenses include the S 14-28mm f/4-5.6 Macro, S 18-40mm f/4.5-6.3, S 28-200mm f/4-7.1 Macro O.I.S., and S 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 Macro O.I.S., with all four receiving the same improvements in firmware Ver.2.0.

Firmware overview

Panasonic Lumix S 14-28mm f/4-5.6 Macro
Ver. 2.0 for S-R1428 – Download link for Windows and Mac

Panasonic Lumix S 18-40mm f/4.5-6.3
Ver. 2.0 for S-R1840 – Download link for Windows and Mac

Panasonic Lumix S 28-200mm f/4-7.1 Macro O.I.S.
Ver. 2.0 for R28200– Download link for Windows and Mac

Panasonic Lumix S 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 Macro O.I.S.
Ver. 2.0 for S-R70300– Download link for Windows and Mac

Improvements

When set to AF mode, preferred functions can now be assigned to the focus ring.
- Compatible models as of Jul. 29, 2026: DC-S1RM2, DC-S1M2, DC-S1M2ES, DC-S5M2, DC-S5M2X, DC-S9

The rotation direction of the focus ring can now be selected according to your preference.
- Compatible models as of Jul. 29, 2026: DC-S1RM2, DC-S1M2, DC-S1M2ES, DC-S5M2, DC-S5M2X, DC-S9

Pro Advice

If you caught Episode 4 of Bokeh Face: Digital Camera World podcast, above, we discussed the best time to install firmware updates, why they matter, and what issues they can cause. It's a helpful listen if you're unsure when – or whenever – you should update.

It's smart to wait a week or two after release to see if any users hit snags. In the past, brands have had a few hiccups with major updates – for instance, introducing memory-setting bugs or minor interface glitches before being reissued.

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Sometimes it’s blatantly obvious when not to take a picture; other times, the line is blurred. But unfortunately, this girl got it horribly wrong and has gone viral for all the wrong reasons.

Her little photo shoot in front of the infamous gates to Auschwitz-Birkenau – the former Nazi death camp where, during World War II, some 1.2 million people are thought to have been murdered – has caused quite a stir, while reminding us of knowing when to put the camera away.

Recorded by a bystander and shared on TikTok, people in the comments have been lambasting her for her “shameless”, “disrespectful” behavior. Although there have been some coming to her defense, claiming that everyone’s “making a fuss over nothing.”

I’m definitely not a fan of this kind of behavior and agree with those giving the girl a reality check. In my eyes, historic sites like Auschwitz are not for self-centered, social-media-driven photography, but rather for reflection and learning.

And believe it or not, when I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2014, I even saw a pair of Orthodox Jews doing the same. Unbelievably, they were posing with their hands on their chins as if philosophers pondering deep thought.

It was an unreal sight: to think that these people may well have lost ancestors in this very place. But like the girl in this viral video, these guys were young – although I’m not sure it excuses such a lack of awareness.

However, I don't want to jump on the bandwagon and tear into this girl. Enough people have already done that, and she’s now probably well aware of the viral backlash her offensive behavior caused.

But it’s a stark lesson that, sometimes, it's best to think twice before pressing the shutter.

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While we’ve all become accustomed to the seemingly never-ending stream of negative AI headlines, once in a while the technology is used for something good – and this is one of those times.

Researchers in the US have implemented camera traps hooked up to an AI photo analysis tool to recognize and document different bee species, validating that these cheap yet effective platforms can replace traditional lethal or time-consuming manual pollinator research methods.

The scientists, based at Oregon State University, built the traps using low-cost, commercially available components ($100-$200 in total each) housing them in weatherproof containers with a solar panel and battery setup.

Then they positioned the cameras at a fixed focal distance, aimed at colored platforms that served as non-rewarding visual lures.

Across 18 days, multiple camera units recorded continuous time-lapse frames during all daylight hours (approximately 06:00-19:00), capturing footage of 6 bumblebee species, closely matching the bee diversity previously documented in the area by traditional methods.

Some 70,000 of these images were then fed into a pair of different AI analysis models. Over 6,000 original-resolution, full-frame images were analyzed by one model and over 66,000 tiles – which came from cropping the full-frame shots – were analyzed by the other.

The AI models then identified and classified the species, flagging and discarding images containing no insects, which reduced raw field data by over 90% without requiring human effort.

Experts then only needed to review a small subset of pre-filtered, cropped insect images to confirm species-level identification, suggesting that continuous multi-day field monitoring can be scaled feasibly.

What a fantastic use of AI to free up the scientists from mundane tasks to focus on the work that truly matters. In my view, this is exactly how AI should be implemented in photography – not to replace the photographer or create slop.

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It’s happened: I’ve been duped by an AI-generated video. I knew this day would come, but I wasn't ready for it to be so soon. I feel afraid, scared, even violated – almost as though, like Morpheus rescuing Neo from The Matrix, I’ve been disconnected from a reality that never truly existed.

Fortunately my machine-generated nightmare only lasted a few moments, not a lifetime. Equally short but frightening is that AI video generation tools have only been around for a few years, yet humans are now capable of producing lifelike videos with them.

I’ve been saying for a while that AI tools are developing faster than most of us want to believe. But, at this rate, it won't be long before the machines completely take over.

As I watched the viral clip showing the behind-the-scenes of a disaster movie being filmed, the thought of it being AI never even entered my mind.

From the way in which the mini tsunami enveloped the model coastal palm trees and later collapsed the buildings further inland, there wasn’t a shadow of a doubt that this was a real video. I even got caught out by the people, something AI typically has trouble rendering accurately in videos.

ABOVE: now I've given it away, the video seem like AI from the start to you, but I was convinced…

But then I headed to the comments to find out more about the film – and here my reality came crashing down. Boom, right there in the second comment: “So, this is an AI video.” In disbelief I scrolled further to see if their claims were unfounded but, to my horror, the two frightful letters 'AI' cropped up again and again.

“This is it,” I told myself, after a moment of being dumbfounded, shocked, and then upset. “You’ve been hoodwinked by an AI-generated video for the first time.” No other AI video has ever seemed real enough to pull the veil over my eyes – something, as a photographer, I’ve prided myself on. But this was different, and I was oblivious.

So I watched again, this time hypervigilant, looking for the telltale signs of AI trickery. And there they were, subtly among the most realistic of frames.

On second watch, the camera dolly riding on rails seemed to move in an ever-so-jerky way. The production support crew running alongside the wave tank, it just didn't look right. Then the dead, but almost invisible, giveaway: a cameraman with two right arms.

But none of this mattered. It was too late; no amount of repenting could undo what had happened. The machine world had hooked me up to its meticulously programmed ruse before sucking me dry of all vitality and tossing me back into the real world (read that in Morpheus’ deep, shuddering voice).

Although, upon rewatching the video, I also read the description properly – and there, tucked away at the end, was an AI disclaimer. So, props to the creator for at least being transparent about their work (unlike the Architect, who purposely programmed the Matrix as an insidious illusion).

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Huawei was one of the first out of the gates to push the smartphone as a genuine photography tool. The Huawei P20 Pro and P30 Pro were particularly compelling, and the company has continued producing ambitious camera phones even as international restrictions have made them increasingly difficult to recommend outside China.

The Huawei Pura 90s Pro Max is the return to the global stage for Huawei flagships, which, in recent years, have rarely launched outside China. Why the international model has gained an additional “s” remains something of a mystery, but the important differences are the global version of its EMUI 16 software and international network support, including 5G.

The Pro Max is the largest and most camera-focused model in the Pura 90s range. Its headline feature is a 200MP periscope telephoto camera with a large 1/1.28-inch sensor, but it also includes a 50MP main camera with a physical variable aperture and a 40MP ultra-wide camera.

With specs like that, Huawei is clearly targeting photographers who might be browsing our guides to the best camera phones or the best Android phones for photography. However, it enters a market now packed with impressive alternatives from Oppo, Xiaomi, Vivo, Samsung, Google, and Apple, several of which offer equally ambitious camera hardware without Huawei’s software complications.

Specifications

Design

The Huawei Pura 90s Pro Max looks gorgeous. The Orange Ocean version I tested blends blue at the top into a rich orange across the lower portion of the rear panel. Huawei says the same transition continues around the aluminum frame, although it mostly just looks gold to me; however, it is still very pretty and complements the finish nicely. It is not a phone for anyone hoping to go unnoticed. The ombré effect is bright and eye-catching. More restrained buyers can choose Blush Gold or Graphite Black.

The phone feels suitably premium in the hand. At 230.5g, it is weighty without feeling excessively heavy, although it remains amongst the larger flagship phones, sitting around the same weight as a Vivo X300 Ultra or Oppo Find X9 Ultra. The outer frame is smooth but not particularly slippery, and the gently tapered edges prevent it from digging into my palm during longer periods of use.

Huawei has also returned to a completely flat screen, which I much prefer for photography, reviewing images and video (and just in general). Curved displays should be consigned to a footnote of phone design. The display itself is excellent. The 6.9-inch LTPO OLED panel is sharp, bright, and richly saturated, with strong viewing angles. Its adaptive refresh rate ranges from 1Hz to 120Hz, which keeps motion smooth while allowing the phone to reduce power consumption when the screen is static.

The front uses Huawei’s Anti-Reflection and Scratch-Resistant Kunlun Glass. Huawei claims this reduces reflections by up to 70%, increases scratch resistance by 16 times, and improves drop resistance by 25 times compared with conventional glass. The phone also carries both IP68 and IP69 ratings. I don’t tend to throw my review units around or drown them, but from sliding in and out of bags and pockets, getting splashed and bumping up against my keys quite a few times, it's still looking good as new.

The P90s’ camera island remains one of the most unusual designs on any phone. I’m not sure how I feel; I don’t love it, but I certainly do not hate it. The rounded triangular arrangement spreads the three lenses across the upper-left corner rather than collecting them into a huge central circle or a small squircle like almost every other phone. It is noticeably different from almost everything else available, and I respect that.

That positioning has one practical advantage: my fingers rarely wandered over the lenses while I was holding the phone. I cannot say the same for several devices with large, centrally positioned camera modules. The bump itself is significant, although Huawei has softened its effect with a sloping outer edge. There is some minor table wobble, but it is less severe than on phones where several individual camera rings are clustered along one side *cough* Samsung. Because Huawei’s module occupies more of the phone’s width, it distributes the weight a little more evenly.

Box contents likely vary by region. Huawei included a charger, USB-C cable, and transparent case in my review unit.

Camera Performance

The Pura 90s Pro Max has three rear cameras. The main camera uses a 50MP, 1/1.28-inch RYYB sensor behind a 24mm-equivalent lens. Its standout feature is a 10-step physical aperture that moves between f/1.4 and f/4.0, with optical stabilization also included.

Beside it is the headline 200MP telephoto. This uses another big 1/1.28-inch RYYB sensor, but places it behind an 89mm-equivalent f/2.6 periscope lens. That provides approximately 4x optical zoom. Although interestingly, Huawei offers a 10x crop as the default “optical” zoom in the camera app, which defies the usual optical crop of twice the standard focal length, which shows how confident Huawei is in its zoom. Finally, there is computationally enhanced zoom for 20x and beyond.

The third camera is a 40MP, 13mm-equivalent ultra-wide with autofocus. Huawei also adds a dedicated True-to-Colour Camera 2.0 sensor to gather additional color information and produce more accurate white balances and skin tones, similar to what we have seen from Oppo and others on recent models.

At their optical focal lengths, all three cameras are very good. The main and telephoto cameras are the clear standouts, but the ultra-wide also produces very nice images, and doesn’t feel like the usual afterthought.

With the Pura 90s Pro Max its just remarkably easy to get good photos. In its standard photo mode, point it toward a scene, and I know I will reliably get a well-balanced, usable image. Exposure is consistently good, white balance is usually effective, and skies in particular retain a realistic blue.

However, while Huawei’s processing does an excellent job of giving photographs immediate impact, it can become overenthusiastic. Images are slightly over-reliant on sharpening, even at the cameras’ native focal lengths. This makes photographs look crisp and detailed at normal viewing sizes, but zooming in reveals fine textures taking on a slightly squiggly, processed appearance. It is not bad, and most people will never notice it. However, it prevents images from looking quite as natural or photographic as those from the best modes available on Oppo and Xiaomi phones with their Leica and Hasselblad input.

HDR is similarly aggressive. The Pura 90s Pro Max is exceptionally good at preserving highlights and pulling detail from shadows, but the result can be a photograph in which almost all the highlights are borderline too bright. I could not find a way to disable HDR capture in the standard camera mode, which is an odd quirk. HDR has its place, particularly in strongly backlit scenes, but I do not necessarily want every photograph to look that way. Editing afterward can tone down some of that effect, but I would prefer more control at the point of capture.

Color consistency across the three cameras is good, but not perfect. Each lens can produce a slightly different white balance, which becomes noticeable when shooting a sequence intended to sit together. The differences are not dramatic, but they make matching photographs more work than it should be. Below you can see the color and contrast become a little moodier between the 1x and 4x cameras, with the 4x not quite capturing the warmth of the day as well.

The 200MP telephoto is enormously capable. At its native 4x focal length, it captures excellent detail with attractive compression and dependable exposure. Results beyond the optical range are also impressive. Huawei’s high-resolution sensor gives the processing system plenty of data to work with, so photographs at 8x and 10x remain incredibly usable and up to optical quality.

However, some limitations appear once I examined the files a little more closely. At approximately 240mm equivalent and beyond, I occasionally saw odd blurring around the edges of subjects, along with small processing artifacts in areas of complicated texture. These effects become more obvious as the light falls and the phone has less genuine image information to work with.

Huawei’s 20x output can look remarkable at first glance, but it should not be confused with optical zoom. It remains a crop enhanced by significant computational reconstruction. It works well for a record shot or social-media post, but pinch in, and there are a lot of smoothed textures and digitally sharpened outlines.

Macro performance is excellent. Both the ultra-wide and telephoto cameras can focus at close distances, giving me a choice between an exaggerated wide-angle perspective and a tighter telephoto composition. The telephoto macro is particularly impressive. I could photograph extremely fine details without placing the phone directly on top of the subject, and in one image of a bee, individual grains of pollen were visible among the hairs on its body. This is one of the best macro cameras I have used on a phone.

The main camera’s variable aperture is another welcome feature, although it's not the game-changer that it could be. On a sensor this small, changing from f/1.4 to f/4 does not transform depth of field in the way it would on a mirrorless camera, but it can help control exposure and extend shutter speeds for more creative long exposures. I would love to see Huawei push the concept further. A smaller minimum aperture, combined with more direct manual control, could make the feature even more valuable for light trails or moving-water effects.

The camera application itself is straightforward, but it has several unnecessary frustrations. There is no direct 20x shortcut, nor are there convenient buttons for intermediate focal lengths such as 1.5x or 2x. Most rival applications let me tap or cycle through their zoom icons to reveal additional options, while Huawei makes me use the imprecise zoom slider.

Pro mode offers manual exposure control, but creative customization is limited. The main color options are essentially Standard, Vivid, and Bright. Oppo’s Hasselblad Master Mode and Xiaomi’s Leica profiles offer much more control over the character of an image, including less-processed output and customizable recipes.

Video quality is good in the standard mode, and the phone can record up to 4K at 60fps from every rear camera and the front camera. Footage is clean, detailed, and easy to capture, while the stabilization makes longer telephoto clips much more practical than I expected.

Unfortunately, the more advanced options fall behind rival flagships. There is no Log capture or LUT support, manual controls are limited, and Huawei’s Advanced Image Stabilization restricts recording to 2.7K. Subject tracking is more limited still, topping out at 1080p. That is difficult to overlook when phones from Apple, Samsung, Vivo, Oppo, and Xiaomi are offering Log profiles, 4K120 recording, advanced codecs, LUT previews, and support for external storage.

Phone Performance

My global Pura 90s Pro Max uses Huawei’s Kirin processor, paired with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. The international model also restores 5G connectivity, something that had been missing from several previous Huawei flagships sold outside China.

In ordinary use, I had few complaints. The phone feels quick when browsing, switching between applications, streaming video, and navigating the camera interface. I did not encounter meaningful hangs or slowdowns, and it handled on-device photo and video editing without any obvious difficulty.

However, Geekbench 6 figures show that Huawei remains considerably behind the latest Qualcomm-powered flagships. Devices using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 deliver more than twice Huawei’s multi-core result. Those benchmark differences do not make the Pura feel slow in normal use, but they matter for demanding games and heavy use.

The more significant issue is EMUI 16. Huawei’s interface is clean, responsive, and generally easy to use, but the global phone does not include Google Mobile Services. That means there is no native Google Play Store, Google Wallet, Android Auto, or properly integrated Gemini. Huawei offers alternatives through AppGallery, Huawei Wallet, Celia, Petal Maps, and Huawei Cloud, and many of those applications are perfectly competent.

The problem is that much of my digital life is tied to Google. My files are in Google Drive, I sign into countless services with my Google account, and I use Google’s applications across several other devices. Replacing one app is manageable, but replacing an entire connected ecosystem is considerably harder.

There are third-party methods for installing many Google applications, including containerized services and manually installed APK files. These can work surprisingly well, but they remain workarounds. They do not provide the same deep system integration, and applications that rely closely on Google Play Services, device certification, payment security, or background synchronization may behave unpredictably.

The global model also has a confusingly restricted set of AI editing tools. Huawei promotes AI De-glare, AI Move, AI object removal, and other generative features in some markets, but the global version is missing these options. That leaves the global Huawei well behind Google, Samsung, Oppo, and several other brands for AI-assisted photo editing, despite the strength of the cameras producing those photographs.

Battery life is excellent. My review unit comfortably lasted around a day and a half with a mixture of photography, video recording, browsing, and general use. Huawei officially rates the battery at 6,000mAh outside the European Union, while the EU version has a 5,270mAh rated capacity. Charging is very fast. The phone supports up to 100W wired charging and up to 80W wireless charging with compatible chargers.

Final Verdict

The Huawei Pura 90s Pro Max is a hard phone to assess. It has built an excellent camera system and wrapped everything in one of the most distinctive designs around. It is comfortable to hold, the display is excellent, battery life is strong, and ordinary performance is smooth.

The cameras are capable of producing outstanding images, particularly at their native focal lengths. I also enjoyed how little effort was needed to get a successful photograph. Exposure, color, and white balance are usually dependable without intervention. However, the processing can look too sharp and too HDR-heavy, while Huawei provides fewer tools than its competitors for dialing that processing back. Its video hardware is impressive, but the lack of Log recording, LUT support, and full-resolution stabilization makes it a less convincing choice for serious video makers.

Then there is Google. Many applications can be made to work, but I never stopped noticing what was missing. The limited AI editing tools on my global unit were also missed. For photographers willing to accept those compromises, the Pura 90s Pro Max is a remarkable imaging device. For everyone else, other Android and Apple phones offer more complete all-round experiences.

Alternatives

Tamron has launched a firmware update for the Tamron 25-200mm f/2.8-5.6 Di III VXD G2 that’s quite frankly mind-boggling. Rather than the usual tame improvements and bug fixes, firmware Ver. 3 actually increases the E-mount lens’ magnification ratio. I’m not even sure how that’s possible – but it is!

The magnification ratio at focal lengths of 25-70mm has been increased to 1:2 or greater. This is sometimes referred to as "half macro", given that a 1:1 ratio is known as "true macro". True macro is when a lens is able to focus close enough to a subject that it can be replicated at life size on the sensor.

Not satisfied with that, however, focal lengths of 35-50mm on the Tamron lens enable you to get even closer – now delivering a 1:1.7 reproduction ratio. Again, quite how it's possible to improve a lens' magnification via firmware is a mystery to me, but I'm definitely all for it!

So, while half macro technically isn’t macro, it still enables you to get very close to your subject – and a whole lot of half macro lenses are nonetheless marketed as macro optics, as it's still very capable for close-up images.

The improvement makes Tamron's 25-200mm an even better updgrade on its 28-200mm f/2.8-5.6 Di III RXD G1 predecessor, which was limited to a 1:3.13 magnification ratio.

To upgrade the lens, you need to connect it to Tamron’s proprietary Tamron Lens Utility software, available for both Windows and macOS, via the lens’s onboard USB-C port. You can find a comprehensive rundown of how to do that via the Tamron support website.

Tamron is in the spotlight today, having confirmed a report that Sony has bid to buy the lens maker. This macro-firmware wizardry probably isn't the reason that Sony is interested in buying the company, but it's certainly exciting to think what firmware wonders might be added to Sony's first-party lenses…

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Check out the best Sony cameras and the best Sony lenses. I took more than 800 photos and this is what stands out for the new lightweight E-Mount and Z-Mount ultra-wide from Tamron.

The DJI Osmo Pocket series went viral for its unusual gimbal-clad camera design, but the feature that made the series so popular is about to come to a smartphone. Honor has released additional details about the previously teased Robot Phone as the first smartphone collab with cinema giant Arri nears the official launch.

The Honor Robot Phone's most unusual feature is the gimbal that’s sitting at the top of the smartphone, which will not only stabilize video but power features like AI-based subject tracking and automatically centered video calls.

The Robot Phone’s unusual design, however, was teased earlier this spring – but at an event in China, the company has revealed more of the camera’s features. The gimbal houses a 200MP camera. The camera uses a 1/1.28-inch sensor and the lens has an f/1.6 aperture.

The camera will also have a periscope camera with a 1/1.4 sensor and f/2.6 aperture, but the company hasn’t shared details on the focal length.

Honor says that the gimbal’s motor is the industry’s smallest micro motor at 2.6g. The gimbal will help power both stabilization and tracking, including predicting motion and double-tapping to follow a subject while filming. Photos of the phone from the World AI Conference show that the gimbal can tuck into the back of the camera when not in use.

Those camera specs don’t beat out the DJI Osmo Pocket 4’s one-inch sensor, but the 1/1.28 sensor is far more competitive when compared to other smartphone cameras. (Another thing the Honor Robot Phone has in common with DJI? Honor phones don’t typically come to the US, though it is no longer part of Huawei.)

But while the gimbal is the most obvious unusual feature about the Robot Phone, the smartphone is also the first to be built in collaboration with cinema camera maker Arri. Among the innovations that are stemming from Arri is the camera’s color science. High-end video features also include Log-C encoding, which helps enhance dynamic range when color grading, LUT color gamuts, and a cinema mode.

While Honor’s latest event brings a slew of new camera details, there’s still much that remains to be seen about the Robot Phone. Full details are expected during the Honor Robot Phone’s launch scheduled for August 12.

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The Canon EOS R6 Mark III has received its first major firmware update, bringing one of the EOS R6 V's standout video features to the enthusiast hybrid camera.

While the update doesn't bring every EOS R6 V feature to the EOS R6 Mark III, Canon is extending one notable feature by allowing the AF (autofocus) for Close-up Demos to be used in additional movie shooting modes.

Previously, creators had to use a dedicated shooting mode with fewer manual controls to access this feature. Firmware Version 1.1.0 now enables it across Creative Zone movie modes, making it much more practical for filming product demonstrations and hands-on videos.

Firmware Canon EOS R6 Mark III

Version 1.1.0

Download links
🇺🇸 US: Windows and Mac OS
🇬🇧 UK: Windows and Mac OS

Fixes and enhancements:
1. Adds the ability to set [AF for close-up demos] during movie recording in [Movie manual exp.], [Movie auto exposure], and other Creative Zone modes to allow for its use in combination with exposure and AF area settings.
2. Adds the ability to set [grid display] during movie recording.
3. Adds support for the Wireless Remote Controller BR‑E2.
4. Adds support for the Software Development Assistance Kit (EDSDK/CCAPI).
5. Fixes an issue that may cause image transfers to an FTP server to fail and for Err41 to be displayed.
6. Fixes an issue that may impact the camera's shooting ability if the auto power-off function is activated during interval timer shooting.
7. Fixes an issue that may cause the camera to not be recognized when connected to a smartphone via USB.
8. Fixes an issue that may cause the movie digital IS metadata to be output incorrectly when recording movies at frame rates below 24 fps in [Slow&Fast Motion Movie] mode.
9.Improves operational stability.

Pro Advice

If you caught Episode 4 of Bokeh Face: Digital Camera World podcast, above, we discussed the best time to install firmware updates, why they matter, and what issues they can cause. It's a helpful listen if you're unsure when – or whenever – you should update.

It's smart to wait a week or two after release to see if any users hit snags. In the past, brands have had a few hiccups with major updates – for instance, introducing memory-setting bugs or minor interface glitches before being reissued.

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Canon has released the first firmware update for the EOS R6 V, delivering one of the camera's most anticipated features: flash support. Firmware Version 1.1.0 fulfils a promise made at launch and also adds support for Canon's BR-E2 Wireless Remote Controller and enables grid display during movie recording.

The biggest addition is support for external flash units, allowing photographers and videographers to use speedlites with the EOS R6 V for the first time.

Because the EOS R6 V has no mechanical shutter, its maximum flash sync speed is limited to 1/60 sec. It also works natively only with flash units designed for Canon's Multi-function Shoe, although older flashes can be used with a compatible adapter.

Firmware Canon EOS R6 V

Version 1.1.0

Download links
🇺🇸 US: Windows and Mac OS
🇬🇧 UK: Windows and Mac OS

Enhancements and fixes:
1. Adds the ability to set [grid display] during movie recording.
2. Adds support for external flash units.
・Flash firing
・E-TTL balance
・E-TTL II meter.
・Slow synchro
・Flash function settings
・Flash C.Fn settings

3. Adds support for the Wireless Remote Controller BR-E2.
4. Adds support for the Software Development Assistance Kit (EDSDK/CCAPI).
5. Fixes an issue that may impact the camera's shooting ability if the auto power-off function is activated during interval timer shooting.
6. Fixes an issue that may cause the camera to not be recognized when connected to a smartphone via USB.
7. Fixes an issue that may cause the movie digital IS metadata to be output incorrectly when recording movies at frame rates below 24 fps in [Slow&Fast Motion Movie] mode.
8. Improves operational stability.

Pro Advice

If you caught Episode 4 of Bokeh Face: Digital Camera World podcast, above, we discussed the best time to install firmware updates, why they matter, and what issues they can cause. It's a helpful listen if you're unsure when – or whenever – you should update.

It's smart to wait a week or two after release to see if any users hit snags. In the past, brands have had a few hiccups with major updates – for instance, introducing memory-setting bugs or minor interface glitches before being reissued.

You might like...

Browse the best Canon cameras and the best lenses for the Canon EOS R6 V.

Most of the best digital photo frames are exactly and only that: digital photo frames. But every so often we come across something like the Google Nest Hub or, in this instance, the myFirst Frame Clario, which supercharges the photo display experience and adds in smart home features such as video calling and calendar interaction.

The Frame Clario is a family hub designed to connect generations through photos, comments, birthday reminders, and video calls. The goal of the frame is to make daily sharing and communication simple for everyone. Having tested it for several weeks, I can testify that myFirst has created a fine-tuned, well-engineered device that is as easy to use for adults as it is for children.

For the purposes of this review, I have focused testing first on its photo display capabilities and second on its video-calling feature. And as it's designed for the whole family, I've drawn in my young children to get first-hand thoughts from the frame's primary target demographic.

Specifications

Price

The Frame Clario costs $89.99 / £89.89 / AU$149.00 and is therefore priced almost identically to the similar, although more well-known, Google Nest Hub. Compared to 7-inch digital photo frames, it sits at a very premium price point, but considering most of those offer zero smart features, you can see what you're paying the extra money for.

If you're not concerned about video calling or interacting with your calendar, then a traditional-featured digital photo frame is a much better bet. You'll be able to get a much larger and higher-resolution display for less money with the Aeezo Portrait, taking pride of place as our favorite budget option in our guide to the best digital photo frames.

Design & Handling

The most obvious thing about the myFirst Frame Clario is that it looks nothing like a traditional photo frame. At 1.30 inches deep and with large rounded corners, it looks more like a mini-monitor or a smart hub than a device to beautifully "frame" your photos. If you're looking for a frame that will blend in with your other photo frames on the mantelpiece or side table, you'll need to look elsewhere.

The display is also much smaller than traditional digital frames, featuring a 7-inch IPS touch display rather than a much more standard 10- or 11-inch screen. The resolution is also lower than I was expecting, maxing out at 1024 x 600 px. These specs mirror the Google Nest Hub exactly. I think 1920 x 1080 px should be the minimum on a device like this, especially when you're wanting to avoid any "low-res" blurring of your photos and videos.

More positively, the build is sturdy and lightweight, utilizing high-quality matte polymers that are designed to resist fingerprints and withstand the hands-on nature of a device meant for children. Despite my children using it to navigate menus, type comments, and interact with photos, the device was weighty enough to remain in place most of the time. And even when it didn't, its robust build quality meant it didn't suffer any damages.

One of the defining design features of the Frame Clario is the dedicated Magic Button located on the top of the frame. This large, friendly physical button provides a tactile way for children to instantly trigger actions like starting a slideshow or making a video call. Other essentials, like the 2MP camera, built-in speaker, and dual noise-canceling microphones, are integrated into the front and side panels to facilitate clear, face-to-face communication.

At the rear, I was pleased to find a USB-C charging port rather than USB-A. That means I can make use of any USB-C cable I have laying around for my plethora of other devices. I would also love to have seen an additional USB port or two for charging other devices that's probably too much to expect at this price point.

Performance

Getting the Frame Clario set up was as easy as it could be, especially given the familiarity of the interface, which is almost identical to iOS pre-Liquid Glass. After connecting to my WiFi, dialing in a few settings, and pairing it with the myFirst Circle app, I was ready to give the features a try.

I began with photos and was able to quickly post one to my group of pre-approved contacts, with a notification popping up immediately on the Frame Clario. Photos can be shared with different 'circles', including family, besties, friends, and acquaintances, with each category containing a pre-defined set of people. The parents are completely in control of these 'safe lists', so children can only interact with the family or friends that you've approved.

Interacting with photos centres around adding an emoji or typing a short comment using the built-in keyboard. Accessing this functionality felt a little clunky and unintuitive compared to a modern social media platform. I think work could be done to better position the social elements and thereby improve engagement with them. My children struggled a little with this, and the long tap for emojis was a little tricky for my youngest child. I also felt that the 16-character limit on ShoutOut comments was rather restrictive.

With the rudimentary photo functionality taken care of, I moved on to setting up a video call with one of my pre-approved contacts. Each person that you want to video call also requires the myFirst Circle app, so you'll need to get your family members and friends on board before you can connect with them.

As expected, the image quality could be better. Despite only being a 7-inch display, the 1024 x 600 pixel resolution wasn't quite sufficient to eliminate a slight pixelation and blurriness, especially around text. Pushing it up to Full HD (1920 x 1080 px) would be a great step in elevating the experience of viewing media as well as taking part in video calls.

The Frame Clario is also capable of playing music (via the microSD card) or built-in soundscapes such as Forest Stream and Fireside Calm. These could be used as white noise to help children get to sleep at night or as ambient noise while relaxing. It's even possible to create your own soundscapes by choosing a blend of elements such as Bird, Cafe, and Footsteps. That was really fun for my children to play with, but there hasn't been much interest in it beyond the initial excitement.

In general, the Frame Clario is a relatively well-set-up hub for interacting with family and friends through photos, video calling, and music. I wouldn't say it's the most streamlined of experiences, though, and more work could be done on the social elements. That said, it's not a bad attempt at replicating the Google Nest Hub experience, but for families with young children.

Verdict

The myFirst Frame Clario sets itself apart from traditional digital frames by being a kid-friendly smart hub. You could think of it as a Google Nest Hub but for children. The device is built well and even has a playful and fun aesthetic which will appeal to families. With that in mind, the Frame Clario excels in providing safe list functionality so children are only able to interact with preapproved family members and friends.

Unfortunately, its technical specifications leave room for improvement, particularly regarding its 7-inch, 1024 x 600 px display. Most of us will have better definition on our smartphones, and the lack of resolution is noticeable during video calls and photo viewing.

The setup is straightforward, but the restrictive character limits are a problem, and clunky emoji menus can feel unintuitive. Ultimately, if you are looking for a high-resolution digital photo frame for your mantel, you should look elsewhere, but if you need a sturdy, secure family portal, the Frame Clario is a commendable, albeit lower-res, contender.

Alternatives

Remote camera apps enable photographers and videographers to use a smartphone as a remote control for a mirrorless camera, along with essentials like wirelessly transferring photos.

But a popular third-party app now supports three camera brands in a single app, along with adding advanced tools like a waveform monitor. Shutter is now Shutter+, an iOS and iPadOS camera app that supports Sony, Canon and Fujifilm cameras.

I tried an earlier version of Shutter last year – I loved that the app didn’t drop connection to the camera, but I also really loved that it had more advanced tools that the native Fujifilm X App didn’t have, including an intervalometer for timelapses and self-portraits.

Shutter has three separate apps for each of its supported camera brands, but Shutter+ now supports all three brands from one app (and one cost). The developer says that photographers working with all three brands see the same features and updates.

But along with supporting all three brands without an app swap, the update for Shutter+ also introduces additional tools. Chief among these is a waveform monitor, a tool for monitoring the brightness of a video.

This joins existing tools like histograms, zebras, false color, focus peaking and LUT previews to give creators more data as they shoot.

The upgrade also updates the windowing for iPadOS, which helps the app to display better across the tablet’s different window sizes and multitasking views.

It adds support for more cameras, too, including the Canon EOS R6 V and Sony A7R VI, and supports new Fujifilm firmware. Canon’s live view using a USB tether has also improved.

Shutter+ continues to offer the features from the older version that made the app popular, including automatically switching from Bluetooth and wireless for the best connection and maintaining it when switching apps or locking the screen.

The app supports tethered and USB connectivity and includes tools like bulb timers, an intervalometer and live view overlays.

While the Shutter+ apps can now support cameras across three brands, the App Store will continue to offer three Shutter+ apps branded for Canon, Sony and Fujifilm.

The developer says this is in order to prevent interruptions for previous subscribers, but all three apps will now support every compatible camera.

The app’s pricing remains the same – after a 7-day free trial, users can continue to use the app with a $65 / £69 / AU$99 lifetime license, or choose a $3.49 / £2.99 / AU$5.99 monthly or $24.99 / £24.99 / AU$39.99 annual subscription.

Shutter+ is available from the App Store.

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The founder of a new photo curation app has said that her creation is the solution to the ever-growing camera-roll clutter crisis: where people are taking more photos than ever, but revisiting fewer and fewer.

Charlotte Riddley, founder and CEO of Yoree, has said that the “memory platform” uses “emotional AI” to intelligently curate personalized image displays from device galleries, enabling us to revisit only the most “meaningful” memories stored on our phones.

“This isn't about taking more photos, or storing them somewhere new,” said Charlotte. “It's about finally getting back to the ones we already have, in a way that feels good, private, and entirely in your control.”

These comments and the release of the Yoree beta app come at a time when people are taking more photos than ever before, but hardly ever revisiting them. In fact, according to research recently published by Popsa, a photobook curation platform, close to 70% of images are never looked at again.

According to Yoree’s creator, the underlying AI functionality, which the company says is based on neuroscience, goes beyond competing apps, enabling us to “drop back into a memory whenever you want to, not just when an anniversary or an algorithm reminds you to.”

What the company hasn’t specified, however, is how Yoree’s AI functions differently from other similar services, such as the AI functionality built into Apple and Android phones. Among other techniques, these use facial recognition and metadata analysis to resurface photos from your galleries.

The Yoree beta app is now available for download on both the App Store and Google Play for Apple and Android devices with a full app rollout expected in February 2027.

At the moment, only one plan is available, which currently costs £3.99/month (approximately $5.50 / AU$7.50), and features the ability to store images—which Yoree calls “memories”—in a private vault and use the AI Story Builder to turn these into stories.

What are your thoughts? Will Yoree truly help us to better manage our backlogs of photos? Or will the camera-roll clutter crisis only be solved by taking fewer images? I think Yoree is a nice idea, but that the latter is the real solution…

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I think it’s fair to say that Elon Musk isn’t a fan of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. The world’s richest person has been rather critical of Nolan’s cinematic retelling of Homer’s epic poem since before its release.

The businessman has been particularly active on X where he’s accused Nolan of chasing awards, mocked the casting of Elliot Page and replied “I’m down” to a post suggesting that he should give Mel Gibson $100 million to create another version of the epic.

Which would actually be a bargain, given that The Odyssey’s budget was reportedly $250 million.

But what really piqued my interest was Musk’s claim that his AI platform, Grok Imagine, will make a “historically accurate” feature film of the Greek epic “true to the art of Homer”. This was accompanied by a link to a three-minute showreel of an AI-generated Odysseus, posted by X user Heavy Pulp.

It’s important to note that this doesn’t appear to be the AI film that Elon is talking about and is presumably designed to showcase Grok’s capabilities. After all, we're only halfway through the year.

But I do find it rather amusing, given how hypercritical the Tesla CEO has been about Nolan’s efforts, that he would link to an AI recreation that’s about as accurate as a Star Wars Stormtrooper with vertigo.

I mean, the first time we get a mid-length shot of the perpetually sweaty Charlton-Heston-like lead, he clearly has a medieval-style sword in his scabbard, with a lengthy guard, a long handle and a circular pommel.

I’m no historian, but I’ve also noticed ancient Greek helmets that look more like the early imperial variety worn by Roman Legionnaires. As well as Sirens clad in yellow dresses that wouldn’t look out of place in Abercrombie & Fitch.

Then there's a scene with water travelling over Odysseus’ back in the opposite direction to the lapping sea. A version of Hermes that looks like he’s stolen his wings from a Victoria’s Secret runway.

And perhaps the most egregious gaffe, a close-up of Odysseus wearing modern-looking earplugs.

Firstly, the crew plugs their ears with beeswax in the myth. And secondly, Odysseus doesn't use the beeswax and is instead tied to the mast of his ship so he can be the first person to hear the Siren’s call and live to tell the tale. And I'm not the only one to have spotted such gaffes, with a thread dedicated to various inaccuracies on Bluesky.

I’ll give Elon the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was too busy preparing for SpaceX’s Starship Flight 13 to pour over the footage like me, but still, a glowing example of historical accuracy it is not.

I’m also rather confused as to why he is so critical of Nolan’s epic, but appears to enjoy 2004’s Troy – a film that deviates from the source material by removing the presence of the gods.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Troy, but it’s hardly 12 Years a Slave or Downfall when it comes to historical (and mythological) accuracy.

Confusing historical accuracy with good filmmaking?

I watched The Odyssey in the theater last weekend and I think it’s an immeasurably lovingly crafted movie that’s an absolute treat to experience. More than that, though, it’s a bastion of traditional filmmaking – an art form besieged by changing audience appetites and increasingly cynical studios.

If you’re even a little bit of a movie fan, The Odyssey is a hugely important cinematic event. Sadly, it’s not often that a new release drums up this much interest, so it’s imperative that we support these movies where we can.

I couldn’t agree more with The Rest Is History co-host, Tom Holland (the other Tom Holland), who praised on X those who waited until after seeing the movie before passing judgment.

The way I see it is that good filmmaking and historical accuracy are two different things and one doesn't necessarily constitute the other. Grok Imagine can go and make the most historically accurate movie ever made, but I've yet to witness anything from any GenAI platform to suggest that it won't be a soulless rendition filled with sweaty waxworks come to ‘life’.

I mean, I’m willing to be proven wrong, but GenAI severely limits the human element, and I believe that the human element is without doubt the most important component of any art form.

Nolan's The Odyssey was shot on IMAX 70mm film, with gorgeous Panavision and Hasselblad lenses, featured a real production crew, real actors, real sets and real practical effects.

Could there really be a more egregious affront to Homer’s timeless classic, spawned from generations of oral retellings, than removing the human element?

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German court rules against photographer whose 'original' image was used to create AI slop – give me a break. Tom Cruise really knows cameras: “We want flaws. You want things that have an emotion. It just has a different kind of feeling to it,” he says gushing over his latest movie's use of the Beaumont VistaVision. I grew up idolizing George Lucas, but his passive stance on AI is deeply wrong.

Sigma has released free firmware updates for 13 Sony E-mount lenses, bringing compatibility improvements for photographers using the new Sony A7 V.

The rollout covers a range of Contemporary and Art primes, including six of the company's premium I Series lenses.

While the firmware versions vary between Version 3 and Version 7 depending on the lens, they all deliver the same fix: resolving a rare issue that could cause the camera's monitor to black out and freeze during shooting when paired with the Sony A7 V.

Firmware

Updates: 17mm, 20mm and 24mm

1. Sigma 17mm F4 DG DN | Contemporary Sony E-mount – Ver.03
Download link for Windows and Mac OS

2. Sigma 17mm F4 DG | Contemporary Sony E-mount – Ver.03
Download link for Windows and Mac OS

3. Sigma 20mm F2 DG DN | Contemporary Sony E-mount – Ver.04
Download link for Windows and Mac OS

4. Sigma 20mm F2 DG | Contemporary Sony E-mount – Ver.04
Download link for Windows and Mac OS

5. Sigma 24mm F2 DG DN | Contemporary Sony E-mount – Ver.04
Download link for Windows and Mac OS

6. Sigma 24mm F2 DG | Contemporary Sony E-mount – Ver.04
Download link for Windows and Mac OS

Updates: 35mm, 45mm, 65 and 90mm

7. Sigma 35mm F1.4 DG DN | Art Sony E-mount – Ver.05
Download link for Windows and Mac OS

8. Sigma 45mm F2.8 DG DN | Contemporary Sony E-mount – Ver.07
Download link for Windows and Mac OS

9. Sigma 45mm F2.8 DG | Contemporary Sony E-mount – Ver.07
Download link for Windows and Mac OS

10. Sigma 65mm F2 DG DN | Contemporary Sony E-mount – Ver.04
Download link for Windows and Mac OS

11. Sigma 65mm F2 DG | Contemporary Sony E-mount – Ver.04
Download link for Windows and Mac OS

12. Sigma 90mm F2.8 DG DN | Contemporary Sony E-mount – Ver.04
Download link for Windows and Mac OS

13. Sigma 90mm F2.8 DG | Contemporary Sony E-mount – Ver.04
Download link for Windows and Mac OS

Pro Advice

If you caught Episode 4 of Bokeh Face: Digital Camera World podcast, above, we discussed the best time to install firmware updates, why they matter, and what issues they can cause. It's a helpful listen if you're unsure when – or whenever – you should update.

It's smart to wait a week or two after release to see if any users hit snags. In the past, brands have had a few hiccups with major updates – for instance, introducing memory-setting bugs or minor interface glitches before being reissued.

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The smart glasses space is getting crowded fast. Less than six weeks after Snap unveiled its AR Specs, Samsung took to the stage at the Galaxy Unpacked event in London to show off its own entry in the category: two new designs of what it's calling "intelligent eyewear", developed in collaboration with fashion eyewear brands Gentle Monster and Warby Parker. No price, no firm release date, but a clearer picture of what Samsung's answer to the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 glasses is going to look like.

They run Android XR, Google's operating system for extended reality devices, powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 chipset. AI assistance comes via Google's Gemini, which can see what you're seeing through the built-in camera and respond to voice commands or touch controls on the temples. You can take photos, record first-person video, get real-time translations, and pull up navigation based on your surroundings. Impressive stuff.

But what's most striking, for anyone who's followed this category, is how normal they look. Both designs could pass for upscale fashion frames at a glance, give or take some thicker temples and a small LED indicator on the front.

That's not a small achievement: the history of smart glasses is littered with products that announced themselves from across the room. But it raises a question the industry hasn't fully answered: if nobody can tell you're wearing a camera, is that a design triumph or a privacy problem waiting to happen?

Is it creepy?

Smart glasses with cameras have had a rough time of it lately. The UK's data privacy watchdog, the ICO, wrote to Meta earlier this year after reports that content moderators had been shown footage filmed with Ray-Ban Meta glasses without subjects' knowledge. Harvard students made headlines by demonstrating how smart glasses could be used to identify strangers in real time. The category has a trust problem, and making the glasses look more like ordinary eyewear doesn't obviously help.

Samsung's response, like Snap's, is an LED indicator that lights up when recording. It's the industry's current best answer, and it's better than nothing. Whether a small light on the frame is sufficient disclosure when you're standing next to someone on the Tube is a question regulators in the UK and Europe are likely to be asking as these products arrive.

Battery breakthrough

Privacy issues aside, what about the specs? Well, battery life is one area where Samsung has a clear edge over Snap: nine hours on a single charge, with the carrying case providing up to seven additional full charges, giving a theoretical total of 72 hours. The trade-off is that these are audio-first glasses with a camera rather than a full AR display device, so the two products are aimed at different ends of the market.

The two designs are distinct in character. The Gentle Monster edition has a cat-eye oval silhouette in slim black, fashion-forward and recognisably on-brand. The Warby Parker design is softer, a subtly upswept brow in brown that sits closer to the Ray-Ban Meta aesthetic, and probably the more wearable of the two for everyday use. Frustratingly, though, Samsung hasn't published camera specifications yet.

Both designs are expected to launch this fall, alongside Snap's Specs and, reportedly, Google's own smart glasses. Whether Samsung can match Meta on price will be crucial. But perhaps the harder question is whether the public is ready for a world where the person opposite them on the bus might be filming – and you'd never know it from looking.

Check out our guide to the best camera glasses you can buy right now

A new start-up is building a wearable that transforms into a stationary smart device at home as tech for creating a daily journal. The start-up behind iKairos is calling the device a “journal for daily reflection and meaningful memories.” The kicker? Those memories are all AI-generated.

iKairos has an unusual design for a wearable – teaser photos show the device worn as a necklace outside. But once the user returns home, the gadget can be returned to a docking station that looks a bit reminiscent of smart home speakers like the Amazon Echo Dot or Google Home.

The design isn’t the only unusual approach iKairos is making for wearables – the device is meant to follow you around to create a daily journal, but unlike traditional wearables and POV cameras, iKairos makes AI-generated images to remember the day by.

On the one hand, Kairos solves a problem with the wearable camera – the limited fixed perspective from body-worn POV cameras isn’t always the best perspective for capturing memories. After all, sometimes I want to be in photos too. The built-in camera also has a cover for privacy.

But is GenAI capable of creating “meaningful memories?” The sample photos that are on iKairos’ website seem like obvious AI generations. But the sample images are all designed for a certain style – and aren’t necessarily made to look like genuine images but rather sketches, comic book art, cartoons, and even crocheted characters.

iKairos is trying to create an AI-generated journal of the day at a time when consumers are becoming increasingly weary of modern tech. We're getting so weary of modern tech that analog cameras are resurging alongside lo-fi digicams and screen-free digital cameras.

iKairos comes from a start-up called Lingverse – but the company isn’t entirely new to the tech world. Lingverse’s founder Jiawei Gu was a board member and investor for Jibo, a social robot that could also take family photos and was one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2017. But after financial struggles, Jibo shut down, turning off its servers in 2019.

iKairos is only in the early stages, but has already secured $29 million in a pre-A funding round. Details on pricing, specs, and the launch date aren’t yet available this early in the start-up's journey – and with the tech in the early stages, the wearable could look quite different closer to launch.

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Oh boy, I’m going to have some fun with this one. A German court has ruled against a photographer who (rightly, in my opinion) sued when her original photograph was uploaded to a GenAI and used to generate an AI-slop cartoon that looks incredibly similar.

In relation to the case, German outlet MIR (Medien Internet und Recht, or 'Media Internet and Law') has published the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf’s guiding principles, of which the first paragraph states:

“The scope of protection for a photographic work is generally limited to the choice of image composition, perspective, lighting, and the sharpness or blur achieved through the correct combination of aperture and exposure time. The subject matter and motif are generally not eligible for protection.”

Ultimately, I do understand this. After all, artists and illustrators frequently use reference images that they don’t own. But where I personally think the court ruling falls apart is that copyright law predates the genAI boom. And genAI is a completely different ballgame.

We’re not talking about a human interpreting an image; we’re talking about the actual photograph being fed directly into an AI. Regardless of the final outcome or how much human involvement there was regarding prompts, the AI is given free rein to process the original work.

You can’t take a copyrighted image and display it on a website for no reason, so why can you take an original image and ram it through the digital embodiment of a meat mincer to be churned into AI slop? Probably because the AI industry doesn’t want to admit that scraping and processing creative content is completely unethical…

This is a fine example of how content credentials just aren’t enough. I want to see a system implemented where images are granted and / or GenAI platforms feature built-in protections, so that an original work that the user doesn’t own cannot be fed into an AI generator in the first place.

Let’s take Andy Warhol, for example. He did not seek permission to use Gene Kornman’s famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe for his Marilyn Diptych and you can certainly argue that he should have done. But you can also argue that Kornman’s original photograph became much more well known because of Warhol's genius.

The same can be said when a musical artist covers another artist’s song; crucially, the paper trail is there. And that’s one of my biggest gripes with GenAI; there’s no paper trail. It’s a deceitful medium that presents unoriginal work as original. Frankly, I applaud and admire the few creatives who are actually taking a stand.

I’ll hold my hands up and admit that I’m not sure I could be bothered to go through the courts over an issue such as this, especially when the outcome is likely going to be unfavorable. But just going through the process is fighting back; it raises awareness and gets people talking.

I can’t help but wonder what the outcome would have been if the original image was a fictional character like Mickey Mouse… Why should a real-world image created by a talented photographer be any different?

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I grew up idolizing George Lucas, but his passive stance on AI is deeply wrong. “AI dilutes what is impressive” – Robert Irwin hits the nail on the head when it comes to artificial intelligence in wildlife photography. How on earth did this obvious AI image get past the judges and win a photography competition?

Smartphone makers are in a race to cram in the latest AI-built features, but the smartphone brand known for its unplugged phones is building an anti-AI flip phone – and it’s full of Y2K charm, including a space for actual keychain charms.

The Light Flip is an upcoming US$299 flip phone that still includes essentials like driving directions, music, a calendar and, of course, phone calls. But Light is also positioning the Flip as the phone for those tired of the AI-focused modern smartphone launches. There’s no chatbot and no touchscreen, just the classic phone number keypad.

While Light says Flip strips the phone down to just the essentials with no AI and no social media, app store, or internet browser, the camera still made Light’s list of what’s essential on a phone. The Flip can take 12MP photos from the camera’s rear 50MP sensor. There’s no front-facing camera on the Flip.

While the Light Flip is designed to bring back the nostalgia for flip phones, this dumb phone has a few modern touches. The charger is USB-C, it’s IP54 rated for accidental water exposure, and there’s a small light on the phone that highlights missed notifications when the phone is shut.

The Light Flip may be more about what’s not included than what is, but the flip phone does still include a 3.5mm aux for wired headphones. There’s still a flashlight function as well.

Light notes that the battery is replaceable, so a tired old battery doesn’t mean needing an entirely new phone.

Adding to the Y2K charm is a keychain loop, which can also be used to add actual charms and accessories.

The Light Flip retails for $299 (about £ 224 / AU$428 / CA$421), with the first pre-orders expected to begin shipping in April 2027. The Flip will be available in six different colors.

The Flip joins Light’s list of phones that embrace minimalism and are built to go light on the distractions, using the stripped-down operating system called LightOS. While the Flip is Light’s first flip-phone, it’s not the brand’s only AI-free phone. The company’s fourth phone joins the ranks of the Light Phone II and Light Phone III.

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The world mostly knows Robert Irwin as a wildlife media personality. But what few realize is that the son of the late “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin is also a wildlife photographer, and a pretty good one for that matter.

In fact, Irwin, who first picked up a camera around the age of 13, has won a Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award, and, in a recent interview with Parade, said that photography is “probably the most formative part of his life” so far.

Above: watch Irwin's interview with Parade

Safe to say, when he started to share his opinions on artificial intelligence (AI) in photography during the same interview, my ears perked up. But while most photographers seem to be focusing on Irwin’s point about AI taking away from the “artistry” of the craft, his point that “AI dilutes what is impressive” is what truly hit the nail on the head for me.

In the not-so-distant past before AI, a photographer would have to go and do impressive things to create an immersive image. Take a phenomenal picture of a sunrise over a remote landscape: the photographer would actually have to hike one of the mountains, lugging their gear up with them, to create it.

Or take Irwin’s own specialty, wildlife. A fantastic portrait of a leopard hauling its prey up a tree normally requires locating the animal through the help of a local guide and waiting patiently for the right moment to arrive.

But knowing that someone sitting at a computer using an AI tool can now achieve the same results takes the sheen off the real deal, mostly because it means you really have to dig deep to find out the story behind the image, instead of being able to take that at face value.

I fear that, in the not-so-distant future, the internet will be so awash with AI fakery that most people who see a real image won’t even consider what went into creating it – the backstory – which, in my view, is a huge part of what makes it impressive.

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How on earth did this obvious AI image get past the judges and win a photography competition?

Samsung's latest foldable phones have arrived, and this year, the brand has changed up the formula. Rather than just the usual flip and fold formats, there's a new phone in the mix, with a wider, more squat cover display, around the same size as a passport.

It's a similar form factor to Huawei's China-only Pura X device, and rumours say Apple's long-awaited foldable will adopt this form factor, too. Alongside the new wider foldable, the classic Flip and Fold models get a refresh for 2026 as well, and Samsung reckons there's a distinct market for each design. I got an early hands-on look at the devices, so let's take a closer look at each model.

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8

Rumours were calling it the Fold 8 Wide, but Samsung has kept things simple; the new model is called the Z Fold 8, while the taller book-style foldable that we know so well is now called the Ultra.

As this naming suggests, the Fold 8 isn't quite as high-end as its Ultra counterpart. It still gets the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy chipset, so it's plenty powerful, but it has one less camera and not as many megapixels.

This model has a 50MP main sensor and a 50MP ultrawide, but no telephoto. You still get dual 10MP selfie cameras, but as with all foldables, it's easy to use the cover screen to take higher-quality selfies with the rear cameras. As a photographer, the lack of a telephoto stings. So while the new form factor is very appealing, the camera compromise makes it a harder sell.

The main new features in the camera department are software-based. You now get a mode that Samsung calls FanCam, which can automatically track a subject in a wide frame and crop a new video in an aspect ratio of your choosing. There's also a new dual video recording mode that can output video from the front and rear cameras at the same time, in a variety of different layouts.

If you're more into consuming content than creating it, though, this new shape has a lot of merit. The folding screen is 4:3, rather than the usual almost-square aspect ratio, which means the black bars are a lot smaller when you're watching 16:9 videos.

The outer screen, meanwhile, is 10:16 (or 16:10 when held horizontally) - the same aspect ratio as most laptop screens. It's wider than normal, which takes a bit of getting used to, but I'm quite fond of it. Surprisingly, the cover screen is really good for watching vertical content like TikToks, Shorts, and Reels. The UI scales well and moves the clutter to the sides of the video, rather than on top of it.

The Z Fold 8, despite being smaller, packs a 4800 mAh battery, outdoing the full-size Fold 7. The charging speed has also dramatically increased, now supporting 45W speeds with a wire. Samsung says you can expect to go from zero to 63% charged in just 30 minutes. Wireless charging is faster, too, at up to 20W.

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 is available in Lavender, Cream, and Graphite colourways, with a Pistachio option available exclusively on Samsung's online store. It starts at $1,899.99 / £1699 / AU$2,699 with 256GB storage, $2,099.99 / £1,869 / AU$2,999 with 512GB, and $2,499.99 / £2,119 / AU$3,599 with 1TB of space, which is cheaper than the Z Fold 7 was, but it's also not quite as high-end.

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra

The Z Fold 8 Ultra is the classic book-style foldable that we're all used to. It's the priciest of the lineup, starting at a cool $2,099.99 / £1899 / AU$2,999 with 256GB of storage, $2,299.99 / £2,069 / AU$3,299 with 512GB, and a whopping $2,699.99 / £2,319 / AU$3,899 if you fancy 1TB of storage, which starts at £100 more than last year's equivalent base model (RAM shortage induced, no doubt).

On the surface, it looks quite similar to last year's model, but subtle changes to the design make a big impact. It's now even slimmer, and it's likely the slimmest foldable on the market right now. It's also significantly easier to open and close, thanks to the reengineering of the hinge, bezel, and magnets. It's an invisible change that's immediately noticeable when you have the phone in your hands.

What's easier to see, though, is the improvement to the crease. Samsung has almost completely eliminated it by using a flexible titanium film and titanium supporting plates under the OLED panel. It's an excellent improvement, and viewed head-on, you can barely see the crease at all. The screen also now opens completely flat, rather than sitting at a very slight V-shape. Again, it's a subtle change, but it's one you'll notice in use. If I'm honest, I think Oppo's Find N6 folding screen is still flatter, but that's not available in most regions, and Samsung has leapfrogged the rest of the competition.

Of course, it also gets the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy treatment, a larger 5000 mAh battery (matching the S26 Ultra), 45W wired fast-charging, and 20W wireless charging.

When it comes to the cameras, it's only the ultrawide that gets an upgrade. You still get a similar 200MP main camera to the S26 Ultra, the same 10MP 3x telephoto, but the ultrawide makes the jump from 12MP to 50MP, which is a very welcome change.

On the software front, though, things are a little more exciting. The Z Fold 8 Ultra benefits from the same near-lossless APV codec that was introduced with the S26 Ultra. It can also shoot at 8K on the main and ultrawide cameras, and there are 4 new CineLUT styles for your Log footage. HDR is now supported for 200MP stills, and you get the same dual video recording options and FanCam modes here, too.

The Z Fold 8 Ultra will be available in Cream, Graphite, and Violet finishes, with a Green version exclusive to Samsung's website.

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8

The Z Flip 8 received a little less love than the other two models. It's 13.1% slimmer, 3.9% lighter, and the crease is improved, but otherwise, it looks a lot like the model that it replaces – and has the same camera hardware, too.

As you'd expect, you get the newest Snapdragon SoC, but as far as I'm aware, the battery capacity and charging speeds remain unchanged. So what does the Z Flip 8 bring to the table?

Well, much of Samsung's presentation focused on what you could do with the cover screen. It now supports Now Brief, and you can access AI automations directly from the cover. FlexWindow home has been redesigned, and there are new custom cards that can be added, too.

Samsung claims these changes are designed to make AI experiences more seamless and easy to access. It also said the Flip 8 is the brand's most AI-native phone to date. The skeptic in me thinks they just didn't have a lot else to talk about, but hey, maybe I'll be more convinced after spending quality time with it.

There are also some new software features for the cameras. Horizontal Lock video stabilisation is now available in FlexCam mode (the half-folded camcorder-style shooting), and the phone uses Samsung's ProVisual engine to improve night photography. It also benefits from the new FanCam and dual video recording options, like the other phones in the lineup.

The Z Flip 8 starts at $1,199.99 / £1149 / AU$1,949 for the 256GB version, and $1,399.99 / £1,319 / AU$2,249 for the 512GB model, which is again £100 higher than last year. It's available in Cream, Graphite, and Pink as standard, with Mint available on Samsung's website.

What you need to know

The new Galaxy Z phones are available to pre-order from today in most regions globally. Units are expected to be on shelves and with customers from August 7.

Prices are higher across the board, but the Z Fold 8 complicates things a little. It's cheaper than last year's Z Fold 7, but it has one less camera. The new shape will be great for some people's needs, but not as good for others. For instance, the traditional book-style shape allows for two apps to display properly side-by-side, while the new shape is better for content consumption.

• Pre-order the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra (US 🇺🇸)
• Pre-order the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 (US 🇺🇸)
• Pre-order the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 (US 🇺🇸)

• Pre-order the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra (UK 🇬🇧)
• Pre-order the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 (UK 🇬🇧)
• Pre-order the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 (UK 🇬🇧)

• Pre-order the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra (AU 🇦🇺)
• Pre-order the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 (AU 🇦🇺)
• Pre-order the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 (AU 🇦🇺)

At this stage, I've only had a quick go with these devices at a preview event, so I'm still formulating my opinions. Stay tuned for full reviews; we'll soon find out how these devices compare to the best foldables on the market.

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Check out more of the best flip and folding phones in our guide, or for the ultimate in phone photography, check out the best camera phones you can buy right now.

Photography is subjective. At least, that is what we tell ourselves when nobody likes a picture we were particularly proud of. But if you have ever wondered what an entirely impartial, unfeeling robot thinks of your pictures, Adobe’s Project Indigo camera app is ready to offer an opinion.

Adobe has added an experimental AI Playground to Project Indigo, its iPhone camera app designed around manual controls, computational photography, and a more natural, SLR-style image. One of its headline features is Photo Guidance, which analyzes a photo and explains what worked, what did not, and how the image could be improved.

It also features a Pixel-esque mode that can suggest how to reshoot the scene while you are still standing in front of it, potentially recommending a different position, framing, lens, or approach to the light. Adobe says it is refining the system so that it understands the limitations of individual phones and does not suggest impossible changes, such as adjusting the aperture on a fixed-aperture smartphone lens.

In theory, this sounds genuinely useful. Photography books, courses, and camera clubs have been offering constructive criticism for decades, so putting a virtual tutor inside a camera app makes a certain amount of sense. Feedback while you are still at the location could be far more helpful and genuine than an AI editor “fixing” everything later.

However, yes, there is something slightly bleak about taking a photograph and immediately asking an algorithm whether it approves. Photography is not a science, and some of the most memorable images succeed because they ignore conventional rules. An AI trained to spot familiar ideas about composition, lighting, and subject separation could easily reward technically tidy photographs while discouraging anything genuinely original.

More Gen AI

Adobe is also adding other AI Playground features to the app, including object removal, simulated shallow depth of field, lighting adjustments, artistic styles, and a Custom Edit box for text prompts. Adobe is initially using Google’s cloud-based Nano Banana model, with generated results limited to roughly 2K pixels per side and an internet connection required.

For now, access is free, requires no Adobe sign-in, and is being offered to only a small percentage of Project Indigo users for a few weeks. The feature appears after updating to version 1.1, but only works with photographs captured inside Indigo.

Adobe says the experiment could be expanded, extended, or eventually turned into a paid feature. Until then, a lucky group of iPhone photographers can discover whether AI thinks their masterpiece is genuinely inspired, or whether they should take two steps left and try again.

Adobe finally put AI into something photographers actually want: help with choosing the best images in the form of early access to AI Assisted Culling. This Lightroom Classic panel sits over everything else on the right panel of the Library module like it’s the most important thing in your photo management world. I’m not saying this placement has rubbed me the wrong way, but.. It has. Why? Well because the idea of AI photo culling software is to save you time. Not waste more time by checking if the rejects were actually good, or that the selects are actually bad.

So, let’s put it to the test on a segment of a shoot and see how it fares, and then look at another tool that claims to do the same thing.

Lightroom’s AI culling is based on a scoring system of subject focus, eye focus and and eyes open, as well as options for exposure issues, misfires, and documents. At the defaults of 50 and 50 for focus, all photos in this set (above) are Selects.

Looking at the selects, there are clearly photos with eyes closed that are not rejected. Older version of Eyes Open had a threshold which was 41 in this photo, but the eyes are clearly at the end of a blink. There are less flattering shots in the set that are mid blink that hit high Eyes Open marks in the older system – they’re just ‘The eyes appear open’ now.

All this leads me to not quite trust this tool yet. I also have exposure issues on and the subject is overexposed in some, but they remain selected. If I have to check the result of AI, then it hasn’t saved me time and is fruitless. If I can trust it to remove blinks and blurs, then it’s time-saving.

So are there other options? Roll in Excire Search 2026. This lifetime license product adds both AI Culling and AI Search to Lightroom Classic. This isn’t a full review by any means, but a comparison (so not including search). This is a well-established product, with a great track record. Once installed, you access it from the Library>Plugin-Xtras menu.

To begin choose ‘Initialize Photos’. A dialog will come up with options. With filmstrip, this is very quick to initialise and get your feet wet. For ‘whole catalog’, this is most likely an overnight affair for those with large catalogs. There is a bit of a learning curve, but some of that is the initialization commands are in Lightroom, not in Excire itself.

You have a lot of control. Once initialized, you can choose Start/Adjust Culling Project from the menu. This is very configurable and will create collections to segregate by visual similarity, group etc as well as choosing how to apply the selection via flag, rating or label. You can even use smiling as a requirement for selection!

The people option is good, for example, on nightclub shots, it still picked out someone whether they had a jacket on or not. I wouldn’t have even known there were 8 shots of that person shot that night.

In terms of using Excire with Lightroom, with two monitors for editing, you could have Lightroom on one, with Excire on the other, but you could also have them side by side on a larger screen. The beauty of Excire’s detection is that it uses colour to indicate sharpness. It shows the detected faces surrounded by a rectangle. The greener it is, the more in focus.

Yellow, like the one above, means that it’s not great. Red means completely out of focus. Faces do need to be towards the camera, with both eyes visible. As you arrow right in Lightroom, Excire also moves to the next image. The colour will change to reflect the focus. Group shots will also show all faces detected with corresponding focus colours. This does speed up choosing compared to Lightroom because the information is on the photos right where you’re looking.

As visual creators, we can decide what level is good enough for our application. You can decide the level of focus you need. For instance, when I did nightclub work, I was working with a fixed aperture of f/4–f/5.6 at most. This was because I used bounced flash and didn’t want to go above ISO1600. This allowed me to maximize my flash recycle time and also save batteries. Large groups could have rows, and sometimes people would start to blur in back or front rows depending of focus. Because these images were being viewed on the web and sharpened for that purpose, almost yellow focus photos were acceptable for this job. In a wedding, this wouldn’t work for formal groups, but it would be acceptable for the dance floor.

So does Excire beat Lightroom’s AI Culling? Well, the detection results are fairly similar. Neither will tell you that you have a masterpiece. Lightroom will detect half faces better than Excire, which needs a full face (it even tells you this if it can’t find one). However, Excire’s use of colour on the image is better than Lightroom’s green tick because you can see the degree of focus immediately, whereas with Lightroom you have to hover to see scores.

With multiple faces, it’s even better seeing it on each face, so you know you can ignore photo bombers or non involved people as they say in the drone world. The option for smiling in social photos is handy, especially if that is what the client asked for. Excire will also sort the images and rate them, something you have to do manually in Lightroom-just a button press though. All in all the process is handled better in Excire Search 2026. And we haven’t touched on the extensive AI search and AI keywording! If you shoot a lot of people photos, especially groups, this will help.

Excire Search 2026 is an additional cost though. It’s $199/£199 or $299£299 in a bundle with Excire Foto 2027. No subscription; this is a lifetime license. Previous version users get a discount code for upgrading, so it’s a very traditional purchase model. Don’t want to upgrade? Just use the version you have forever.

I know that AI tools are becoming better and better at producing lifelike imagery, but how on Earth this image, which was recently disqualified after winning a Chinese photography competition, even made it past the judges has baffled me.

The image depicting three sanitation workers enjoying a laugh together while taking a break recently won first place at the July edition of the Hohhot Mass Photography Bi-monthly Competition, a multi-series event hosted in the city of Hohhot, North China.

However, just days later, on July 14, amid fierce public backlash citing clear AI usage, the event organizers, the Hohhot Federation of Literary and Art Circles, disqualified the image following an investigation confirming it had, in fact, been generated with AI.

The literary and art circles federation announced the disqualification on WeChat (China's social media platform), in the same post stating that the Northern Frontier Light and Shadow of Qingcheng photography competition would be suspended immediately.

“This incident has exposed issues in our work, such as lax vetting during the review process and imprecise definitions of evaluation standards,” the statement read.

From the identical faces of all three subjects in the offending image, along with their exaggerated laughter – not to mention the strange way in which one of them is throwing water overhead from a kettle – to my eye, this image is clearly AI.

I'm sure it won't be too long until we can no longer distinguish between an AI-generated image and one taken by a photographer using a real camera, but this AI fakery isn't convincing at all, at least not to me.

In the WeChat statement, the competition organizers also vowed to “deeply absorb this lesson” and said that review checkpoints would be “strictly” enforced for all future competitions.

What are your thoughts? Is this image convincing in any way, or were the competition judges simply too naive?

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OnePlus has announced that it is exiting North America and Europe. No new products will be launched in these regions, though existing users will continue to receive software updates and aftersales service, and OnePlus will still honor warranty obligations.

The decision to wind down North American and European operations was apparently a carefully-considered long-term strategy plan, and one which wasn't dictated by parent company Oppo, nor made unilaterally by OnePlus. OnePlus will continue to operate in the Indian market, where it believes it can better serve its customers. To fill the gap left by the OnePlus departure from Europe, Oppo said it plans to increase investment in its European operations, placing a greater emphasis on its flagship phones, as well as increasing its overall product availability. This direction builds on its existing efforts to increase brand awareness in Europe, such as its sponsorship of the UEFA Champions League. However, OnePlus users in North American don't have such an easy alternative: Oppo phones aren't officially sold there, meaning there's no direct OnePlus replacement brand.

The news that OnePlus is leaving two of its largest markets will come as a surprise to many. It's hard to overstate just how big an impact OnePlus had when it burst onto the smartphone scene back in 2014. Its first phone model, the OnePlus One, was a true disruptor in the Android sector, offering flagship-level performance at a significantly lower price point than more established contemporary brands like Samsung and HTC. OnePlus traded heavily on this, evidenced by its ‘Flagship Killer’ slogan. The appeal of the OnePlus One was heightened not just by its value, but also its exclusivity. In the early days of OnePlus, you could only buy a OnePlus One by entering an invite system, reducing available supply and thereby increasing demand. The phone itself ran on OnePlus's new OxygenOS - fresh in name, but also in nature, as it was close to stock Android and largely free of speed-sapping bloatware.

In the years that followed, OnePlus continued producing phones with a strong value-for-money ethos, but fast forward to 2026 and the brand finds itself in a very different smartphone market. There is now far more competition in the value sector, with brands like Nothing (and its sub-brand CMF), Redmi, Poco and Realme (also an Oppo sub brand) all competing directly with OnePlus. OnePlus's pricing has also increased in recent years as it's sought to develop a more premium market position, and we've seen a closer relationship with parent brand Oppo. Oxygen OS and Oppo's ColorOS share the same platform, and it’s easy to see similarities between the two brands when it comes to hardware, with the OnePlus 15's rear panel looking suspiciously similar to the Oppo Find X9 Pro.

The close tie between the two brands' operating systems is now about to become a fusion. Oppo has stated that going forward OnePlus phones will run ColorOS, with ColorOS being rolled out to OnePlus phones in North America, Europe, and other regions, such as India, over the coming months. Users will be able to choose whether or not to switch from OxygenOS, while older OnePlus models that are not included in the ColorOS update scope will continue to receive version maintenance support.

So there you have it: the end of an era for what's been an integral element of the Android phone story in the west. OnePlus, you will be missed.

Samsung’s next Galaxy Fold and Flip phones look set to receive a new generation of foldable screen with reduced crease visibility and "a more refined foldable experience". Called Flex Titanium, the technology integrates two titanium-based components — a titanium-alloy film and a titanium plate — which are said to work together to balance slimness, flexibility, and strength within the foldable display structure.

Titanium is known for its excellent strength to lightness ratio. It's been used in demanding applications like satellite antennas and the wheels of a Mars rover. It also provides an ideal basis for Samsung's new display structure, as it ensures the screen will withstand external shock and be flexible enough to endure repeated folding, while also being thin enough to be practical for a foldable device.

The drawback to using titanium in a folding application is the material's stiffness - it doesn't want to bend! To solve this rather fundamental issue, Samsung has integrated titanium in two key components: a titanium-alloy film and a titanium plate. The titanium-alloy film supports the display from within, sitting below the OLED panel. Compared with a conventional polymer film, titanium provides 20 times greater mechanical stiffness. It's also thin - really thin - measuring roughly one-third the thickness of an average human hair, enabling a slimmer-overall display panel.

Below the titanium-alloy film sits a robust titanium plate; a flexible structure that provides stable support underneath the display when unfolded, while retaining the flexibility needed to accommodate repeated folding. The new tech is said to display deliver ultra-vivid display resolution with reduced power consumption, thereby delivering a dramatic boost in overall power efficiency.

Flex Titanium technology will debut with Samsung’s next-generation Galaxy foldable devices: the Z Fold 8 and Z Flip 8, which will be revealed at the next Galaxy Unpacked event on July 22, 9am EDT.

Nikon filmmakers and photographers can now take advantage of a third-party remote-control app designed specifically for Z-Series cameras. Parallax Monitor or ZR Ctl, depending on whether you’re using iOS or Android, respectively, allows users to take full control of a compatible Nikon camera, using both the app and their chosen smart device as a live view monitor and control station.

I first learned about Parallax Monitor / ZR Ctl via Nikon Rumors and immediately likened it to Nikon's existing proprietary app SnapBridge, which allows users to wirelessly connect a smart device to compatible Nikon cameras as well as share images via file transfer. However, Parallax Monitor / ZR Ctl isn’t an alternative to SnapBridge, it’s a completely different piece of software that’s directly aimed at serious videographers.

The app uses a range of live view overlays to help maintain correct and consistent exposure, including ‘traffic lights’ and zebras, as well as waveforms and histograms that are said to be calibrated for R3D, N-Log and SDR. It also claims to allow users to pull focus via a touch-controlled ‘Pull tool’, aided by focus peaking while also providing a ‘Cinematic AF’ trigger.

A simple function that I’m sure many videographers will make use of is the ability to switch between multiple aspect ratios via the live view screen, so if you’re trying to shoot a scene for multiple aspect ratios, you can ensure your subject is adequately framed for each. If you use anamorphic lenses, the anamorphic desqueeze function will allow you to ‘desqueeze’ at 1.33x, 1.5x, 1.8x, 2x, or any custom ratio in real time, so you can preview what the end product will look like.

Users can also access a variety of Playback features. You can preview LUTs during Playback, check audio, stream clips, and more. And finally, Parallax Monitor / ZR Ctl might be marketed towards videographers, but it also boasts a remote stills photography featureset, allowing you to review photographs over Wi-Fi, fire the shutter remotely, refine settings and more. Parallax Monitor is available via Apple’s App Store for $19.99 / £19.99 or ZR Ctl via Google Play for $19.99 / £17.99.

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More than 15 years after medium format powerhouse Hasselblad first launched an iOS app, the Phocus Mobile app is finally arriving on Android devices. Hasselblad, the medium format camera powerhouse, has officially brought its Phocus Mobile app to Android devices beginning.

Phocus Mobile now enables photographers working with the Hasselblad X2D II 100C, X2D 100C, 907X and CFV 100C to review, edit and organize images from an Android smartphone.

The app, importantly, supports Hasselblad’s heralded color science (Hasselblad Natural Color Solution or HNCS), enabling mobile photo editors to preserve the medium format colors and gradations from camera to edit to export.

On the X2D II 100C and supported HDR Android devices, that also includes full-spectrum HNCS HDR – which Hasselblad says more closely matches what the eye sees.

Another key feature is that the Hasselblad-built AI noise reduction algorithm is also coming to the mobile app. The AI was built entirely on images from Hasselblad’s medium format sensors and comes in two different modes, one for the cleanest result and one for preserving the most detail.

Beyond editing, the Android app can also be used to review photos, rate the best shots and even batch edit multiple images at once. Files can be transferred from the camera to the smartphone using Wi-Fi or, for the X2D II 100C with updated firmware only, USB-C wired connection.

Phocus Mobile first arrived on iOS in April 2012, with an overhaul big enough to be dubbed Phocus Mobile 2 arriving in 2019 – but again as an iOS exclusive.

The update is the second time that Hasselblad has launched a feature to play nice with more brands in nearly as many weeks. Earlier this month, Hasselblad also announced support for Capture One.

The Phocus Mobile app requires at least 12GB of RAM and is compatible with Android 12 and newer devices, though the company recommends Android 16 with Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 or newer for the best performance.

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There are few creatives I admire more than George Lucas. He’s heard it all before, but I’m not sure I could put into words just how much Star Wars and Indiana Jones have meant to me over the years. Heck, I even crack out American Graffiti every now and then and have always been a strong proponent of the Prequel Trilogy (I just don't get the Jar Jar hate...). That said, I will always stand up for what I believe in, and I’m not keen on the legendary filmmaker’s latest take on AI.

In a very interesting long-form interview with film, art and culture magazine A Rabbit’s Foot, Lucas discusses the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which he co-founded with his wife Mellody Hobson and is set to open in September, why he thinks so many older Star Wars fans didn’t resonate with the Prequel Trilogy, and his stance on artificial intelligence.

It’s the latter that really piqued my interest, given that I’ve written an awful lot about AI and its impact on both film and photography. His first point is that AI makes filmmaking easier, and I can’t argue with that. He then likens opposing AI to opposing the invention of the car “they break down, they need gas (...) pretty soon they’ll be making them into tanks,” going on to say “There’s nothing you can do about it (...) That’s progress, it’s the future.”

For me, that’s the kicker. This notion that you can’t do anything about AI, or on the other side of the coin, that AI is inherently bad and it shouldn’t exist at all. Both arguments are extremes, but what about the middle ground? What about a world where AI exists, but we do indeed do something about it?

I don’t have a hatred of AI. I have a hatred of unethical, generative AI. The kind of artificial intelligence that scrapes existing works, regardless of copyright and MacGyvers them into AI slop. My problem with generative AI is that it removes the human element and to me, it’s the human element that makes art, art.

I'd go so far as to suggest that George skewers his own argument, because he mentions several times during the interview that movies are about emotion. “You go to the movies because the stories move you emotionally,” he says. The article finishes with him stating: “Steven and I always agreed on that: what you’re selling, in the end, is emotion.” I couldn’t agree more!

But the whole problem with generative AI, in my mind, is that it strips out the emotion and leaves behind little more than a creative husk. I get that Lucas’ whole deal when it comes to moviemaking is pushing the envelope. The Original Trilogy wouldn’t have been made if it wasn’t for the filmmaker’s faith in both technology and indeed his own ability.

Lucas famously founded Industrial Light & Magic during the production of Star Wars: A New Hope, going so far as to actually build custom tech to deliver the film’s ground-breaking special effects. Love it or loathe it, the Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition was a bold, groundbreaking move. And Star Wars: Attack of the Clones was famously the first Hollywood blockbuster to be shot digitally in its entirety, with the film also landing an Academy Award nomination for its visual effects.

It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that George is a proponent of AI when it comes to filmmaking. I just wish the medium’s supporters would take a more proactive approach to AI’s involvement in a bid to preserve the emotion that George Lucas himself covets so much. It’s worth noting that I’m adding my two cents to a few words provided in an interview. I’m sure Lucas would have much more to say on the matter in an open discussion. Maybe our views are more aligned than I think… If you’d like to weigh in yourself, leave a comment below.

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Founded in 2016, Emeet has produced a wide range of webcams, some of which have picked up awards for design. I reviewed the Emeet Pixy for Digital Camera World back in July 2025, giving it 5 stars - so it was no surprise to me that the Pixy won the Red Dot Design Award in 2026. The innovatively designed Pixy was a dual-lensed laptop-mounted webcam that could pan and tilt to keep you in the frame, even if you stood up from your laptop and walked about. I was therefore very keen to test out a more recent offering from Emeet - the SmartCam S600L.

The Pixy’s PTZ (Pan, Tilt, Zoom) key design innovation was the mini-gimbal that it was mounted on. The SmartCam S600L’s design innovation is that it combines a webcam with a ring light, enabling you to capture or stream better quality video than you can with your laptop’s built-in webcam.

The Emeet SmartCam S600L enables you to stream high-quality footage in 4K. For our recommendations on other 4K-capable laptop webcams, check out our buying guide.

Specifications

Price

The Emeet SmartCam S600L officially retails at $104.99 / £71.99. I use a 2023 15-inch MacBook Air with an M2 chip, and its built-in FaceTime HD camera produces 1080p footage that looks soft, lacks contrast, and can look a bit noisy in low light. I can’t afford to upgrade to a newer M4 MacBook Air with its 12MP Centre Stage camera, so an outlay of £72 for the Emeet SmartCam S600L is a much more attractive and affordable way to stream sharper-looking footage from an old MacBook! Check out my supporting video in the Performance section to see the difference between my MacBook’s camera and the Emeet SmartCam S600L.

Design and handling

It’s always interesting to handle an Emeet product, as they tend to be well-built and have innovative design features. The Emeet SmartCam S600L lacks the built-in gimbal and dual lenses of the award-winning Emeet Pixy, but it also lacks the Pixy’s higher price tag (which officially retails at nearly twice the price). The Emeet SmartCam S600L also boasts a feature the Pixy lacks: a built-in LED ring light. The ring of LEDs encircles the webcam’s lens, so when you look directly at the camera, it creates a subtle catchlight in your eyes (or less subtle if you wear glasses!) — adding a sparkle that helps bring your face to life on video calls.

Even though it is made of plastic, the Emeet SmartCam S600L doesn’t feel cheap and nasty. It has a solid build and feels surprisingly heavy for such a small device, weighing in at 124g on my kitchen scales. Fortunately, it was not too heavy to sit comfortably on the top of my MacBook Air’s display. It has an adjustable hinged clip that grips the top of the display. Rubber inlays on the inside of the hinged grip ensured that the SmartCam had a tight and secure grip on my MacBook’s thin screen. At the base of the grip is a 1/4” threaded hole, so you could pop the S600L on a tripod if you wanted to film yourself from an angle. If the tripod has an adjustable ball head, you could flip the camera at an angle and stream vertical footage instead of horizontal. So this tripod thread is a welcome design touch.

The Emeet SmartCam S600L has a single circular knob on its side. This also functions as a dial. Press the knob to turn on the LEDs, press it again to toggle between different colour temperatures, and rotate the knob to adjust brightness. The ball joint connecting the camera to its clip enables you to rotate the light through 360º. You can also tilt it by a 15º angle to fine-tune your position in the frame.

One useful and welcome design touch is the privacy switch. If you’re having a bad hair day and want to listen and talk in a Zoom meeting without being seen, then simply slide the switch to activate a built-in lens cap. The cap is a vivid orange, so it’s very clear when you’re using the SmartCam in privacy mode.

Performance

When I unboxed the S600L, I was a little concerned to see that the end of its cable had a large USB-A connector. My MacBook Air only has USB-C inputs, so I thought I’d have to hunt out my USB hub to get the camera to talk to my MacBook. Fortunately, I realised that I could remove the camera cable’s USB-A adaptor to reveal a USB-C plug. I popped this plug into my MacBook’s USB-C socket and the SmartCam S600L’s ring light began to display an animated pattern that cycled through all of the colours in the spectrum. This indicated that it was active and ready to stream/capture footage.

The ridged edges of the SmartCam’s single control knob enabled me to easily adjust the brightness of the LEDs mounted in the ring around the lens. This sounds like a useful option, but to be honest, I can’t imagine a scenario where I’d want to reduce the brightness of the LEDs, as they are only capable of a maximum 60 lux from a distance of half a meter. For the duration of my test, I kept the brightness to maximum. At the brighter end of my kitchen (it’s less messy than my home office to film a review), the side-angle key light from a window caused half of my face to appear in shadow. By activating the S600L’s LEDs, I was able to summon a fill light to make the lighting look a little bit more even. The LED lighting was more effective and noticeable when filming at the darker end of the kitchen, as you’ll see from my supporting video.

I was able to press the control knob to cycle through lighting presets - cool (6200K), warm (2600K), mixed (400K) and ambient. By default, the ambient lighting is a cold blue, but if you open the supporting Emeet Studio app, you can change the ambient preset to more creative colours such as Pink, Purple, Blue, Cyan, Yellow and Orange. I found the creative ambient colours to be less bright than the more subtle colour temperature presets, plus the cool 6200K preset best suited and complemented the similar lighting streaming in from my test location’s windows.

I started my test by recording a QuickTime sequence using my MacBook’s FaceTime HD camera and then recorded a sequence using the S600L. The S600L’s 4K footage was much sharper than my MacBook’s native camera, and there was a wider tonal range with stronger shadows and brighter highlights. The MacBook footage looked a little warm, whereas, thanks to a more accurate white balance reading, whites looked white in the S600L footage, creating cooler, more natural-looking skin tones.

The spec of the Emeet S600L indicates that it is fast to focus (in 0.2s), keeping you nice and sharp at all times. I tested this claim by placing my iPhone 17 close to the lens and then removing it. It did indeed keep the nearby iPhone looking nice and sharp and then quickly refocussed on my face when I removed the iPhone from the shot.

The S600L also had two built-in microphones, so I tested those too, of course. My MacBook’s built-in mics captured more bass in my voice, but they were also slightly muffled. The audio captured by the Emeet S600L was much sharper and clearer, but at the cost of sounding a bit too thin. Have a listen to my test video. The Emeet S600L’s audio also sounds a little quieter. I’ve tweaked the levels a bit, but I haven’t adjusted loudness or EQ, as I want to give you an accurate comparison between the S600L’s mics and my MacBook’s built-in ones.

Verdict

An affordable way to make my 2023 MacBook Air’s built-in webcam video footage look better would be to use my iPhone 17 as a Continuity Camera. This would enable me to stream much better-looking footage from the iPhone’s superior camera. However, using an iPhone for this purpose means popping it on a mini tripod and then removing it from the tripod if I needed to use it to take a call.

The advantage of the Emeet SmartCam S600L is that it’s a dedicated webcam. It takes seconds to clip it onto my laptop, and it sends a superior video feed through a wide range of applications such as Zoom for streaming or QuickTime for recording ‘talking to camera’ movies. The built-in ring light can be triggered with a tap, and its integrated design means that I don’t need to faff about trying to align a separate ring light with my webcam.

At a maximum of 60 lux (that’s around 60 candles), the ring light isn’t the most powerful LED available, but in bright conditions it will fill in harsh shadows on your face, and in darker locations it helps the Emeet SmartCam S600L’s 1/2” CMOS sensor reduce the presence of noise in your footage.

Alternatives

While Huawei might not be the name it was several years ago in the West, it remains a dominant powerhouse in its home market, offering up some of the best camera phones around. Huawei is now stepping back into the global market, unveiling the Pura 90s Pro Max and Pura 90s Pro, bringing its latest pair of 5G photography-focused flagship phones to Europe.

The phones are known simply as the Pura 90 Pro Max and Pura 90 Pro in Huawei’s home market, with a mysterious “s” added to the international versions. Huawei has not explained what the letter stands for, although the overseas lineup appears to retain the same camera hardware that made the Chinese models so interesting.

The headline act is undoubtedly the Huawei Pura 90s Pro Max, which has a 200MP telephoto camera built around a large 1/1.28-inch RYYB sensor. That is around the same size as the main camera sensors used by many competing flagship phones, except Huawei has placed it behind an approximately 96mm-equivalent f/2.6 lens, offering roughly 4x optical zoom rather than the more common 3x.

Huawei also claims the telephoto camera offers optical stabilization equivalent to seven stops, as well as a close-focusing telephoto macro mode. The company is particularly promoting its performance at longer digital zoom settings, including a new 20x ultra telephoto video mode.

Video also now sends more of the original image data to the phone’s processor before enhancement – which Huawei claims produces cleaner, more detailed footage.

A full-resolution 200MP photo mode will be available at the native 4x focal length. But for more conventional shooting, the sensor will use pixel binning to improve light gathering and produce more manageable image files.

The telephoto is joined by a 50MP main camera with the latest LOFIC tech for high dynamic range, as well as a proper 10-step physical aperture running from f/1.4 to f/4.0. Whilst variable aperture is an unthinkable omission in a digital camera, it is still very rare to find this in a phone. This should give photographers greater control over exposure and depth of field than the fixed apertures found on most rival phones. There is also a 40MP, 13mm-equivalent f/2.2 ultra-wide camera.

Huawei’s also included its second-generation True-to-Colour Camera 2.0, which works alongside all three cameras to analyze the light and colors within a scene. Huawei says this should improve color accuracy in difficult conditions, particularly when shooting under mixed artificial lighting where skin tones, neon lights and strongly saturated colors can quickly confuse a smartphone’s processing.

There are plenty of AI features as well, although one of the more interesting additions is designed to help photographers before they press the shutter. The phone can analyze a composition and suggest that the photographer physically moves forward, backward, or sideways to improve the framing. This seems to be a new frontier of camera AI, with Google, Samsung, and Sony all debuting versions of this tech in the last 12 months.

The smaller Pura 90s Pro retains the 50MP main camera with its f/1.4-f/4.0 variable aperture, but swaps the 200MP telephoto for a 50MP f/2.1 telephoto macro camera. Its ultra-wide camera also drops to 12.5MP, although it keeps the True-to-Colour Camera 2.0 system.

Away from the cameras, the Pura 90s Pro Max has a 6.9-inch LTPO OLED display with a 1-120Hz adaptive refresh rate and a 2880 x 1308 resolution. The screen uses Huawei’s anti-reflective and scratch-resistant Kunlun Glass, while the phone weighs approximately 230.5g.

The Pura 90s Pro is a little more manageable, with a 6.6-inch 1-120Hz LTPO OLED display, a 2760 x 1256 resolution, and a weight of around 213.5g.

Both phones have a 6,000mAh battery in their Chinese specifications, but the international version will ship with a 5,200mAh cell to meet EU regulations. The Pro Max supports charging at up to 100W over a cable and 80W wirelessly, while the Pro offers 66W wired and 50W wireless charging, so long as you use a compatible charger.

Not afraid of standing out, the design is an interesting one, with one of the more unique camera bumps around. The standout Pura 90s Pro Max finish is Orange Ocean, which blends orange and blue across both the rear panel and metal frame. More demure Blush Gold and Graphite Black versions will also be offered, while the Pura 90s Pro comes in White, Mulberry Black, and Orange Soda finishes.

Huawei has not yet confirmed final pricing or precise country-by-country availability for Europe. Buying and living with a new Huawei phone still remains more complicated than it should be. The Pura 90s phones do not officially include the Google Play Store or other Google apps and services. Huawei offers its own AppGallery store, and many popular apps can be installed through alternative methods, but software that depends on Google Play Services may not work correctly.

That remains frustrating because on camera hardware alone, the Pura 90s Pro Max looks like it could be one of the most interesting camera phones of the year.

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I can’t count the times that I’ve heard the phrase “AI is inevitable,” but a recent reversal by Instagram’s parent company proves there’s still power in the voices decrying AI. Meta has pulled the controversial tool that enables the new Meta Muse Image generative AI to tag public profiles to use their likeness and style in fake images.

Last week, Meta unveiled its first in-house built image generator called Meta Muse. Among the different features, however, was a tool that enabled users to use an “@” tag on any public account to generate images that looked like that person as well as images that could copy the user’s style.

The tag feature wasn’t live for a week before Meta pulled the plug following backlash over the tool. Critics cited privacy concerns, as the AI could generate fakes that resembled real people using a basic “@” tag.

Much of the public outcry came from the fact that the tool was on by default, and users had to adjust their privacy settings to prevent others from creating images based on their Instagram profile.

As a photographer, I opened Meta Muse last week to see just how dangerous the AI really was – and found that using an “@” tag didn’t just copy someone’s face, but could also copy a specific photographer’s style, all based on their Instagram profile.

Meta’s quick reversal of the tagging feature inside Muse Image hints at the power of the public voice in the AI era. While many have said that AI is inevitable, the outcry following the controversial feature hints that the resistance to AI isn’t just limited to artists who make a living creating what a computer is now trying to imitate.

Meta isn’t pulling the entire Muse Image platform, but it has removed the tagging tool. While the tool’s willingness to take anyone’s likeness was a concern among a wide variety of Instagram users, its willingness to steal a particular style is disconcerting for artists.

While many AI platforms have no issues with generating an image based on an artist’s style, Instagram has long been a social network that artists have used to reach new audiences. Deleting social media accounts to protest the feature would have meant losing a valuable tool for reaching and cultivating new fans.

Meta’s reversal of the tagging feature is only one small win in the age of AI, but the reversal proves that people’s voices still have power – and sharing ethical concerns in the AI era isn’t shouting into an empty void.

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Movavi Video Editor 2026 is a non-linear video editor [NLE] that enables you to quickly trim and reorder a sequence of video clips to tell a more succinct and entertaining story on your YouTube channel or social media feed. I started editing video back in the late 80s. Before the invention of NLE apps such as Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro, I had to play unedited RAW footage from a videotape player and record the good bits onto a videotape recorder.

If I needed to swap the order of any clips, then I had to tape over edited footage with the new clips (which could mean starting the whole edit from scratch if the change occurred near the beginning of the programme). This meant that it took me far longer to edit a programme using a tape-to-tape linear edit suite than it does using today’s drag-and-drop digital non-linear apps. And if I needed to create a transition, such as a dissolve or wipe between two clips, then I needed to hire in an extra video player and a vision mixer.

If the younger 1980s version of me could have glimpsed an NLE such as Movavi Video Editor 2026, it would have blown my mind, especially as it enables one to swap the running order of clips in seconds and drag and drop in titles and transitions instantly. And as for the ability to use AI to make a title or graphic track the movement of a subject! Brain-melting stuff.

Movavi Video Editor 2026: System requirements

Movavi Video Editor 2026: Price

I found the pricing models for Movavi Video Editor 2026 to be a little confusing at first, but here are your options. For starters, you can subscribe to Movavi Video Editor 2026 on a monthly basis at $23.95 / £17.95 per month. A much cheaper option is to pay $69.95 / £53.95 per annum for the Movavi Video Editor Plus plan. With the subscription options, you’ll get any updates to the software.

If you’re not a fan of subscribing, then you can purchase Movavi Video Editor for a one-off payment of $99.95 / £89.95. However, this lifetime purchase version won’t receive any updated tools or effects. Oh, and if you want to access all the available effects packs, it’ll cost you an additional $139.95 / £80.95 per year (or $49.95 / £28.95 per month).

Given that you can subscribe to Adobe Premiere Pro for $22.99 / £21.98 per month, Movavi’s monthly subscription is a little cheaper, but the annual subscription is much better value for money, and you’ll get to enjoy any upgraded tools and effects. It’s worth noting that Movavi Video Editor 2026 is available for a free 7-day trial, so I’d certainly recommend taking it for a test drive (if you don’t mind being bombarded with emails offering tutorials!).

Movavi Video Editor 2026: Interface and usability

If you’ve used any non-linear video editing apps before, then you should be able to jump right in and start using Movavi Video Editor, as it hasn’t reinvented the wheel when it comes to interface design. The general interface is black and grey, with icons and text labels rendered in easy-to-read white. This makes the app resemble most other NLE apps such as Final Cut Pro.

The clean and neutrally coloured interface design enables you to focus on the art of editing your raw clips into a slick show. Along the bottom is the obligatory timeline, where you can drag and drop clips from the bin and then drag the cursor to trim their duration and rearrange their running order. Above the timeline is a collection of icons that enable you to summon tools such as the Blade, which cuts a clip into two with a click in the timeline.

You can view your programme as it takes shape in the main viewer, which can be expanded so that your programme fills the entire frame. On the far left is a toolbar that gives you access to a suite of extra post-production assets such as Audio (which includes music tracks), Text (animated banners and graphics), and Elements (which contains eye-catching stickers that are helpfully grouped into themes such as Gaming and tech or Family and kids).

Movavi Video Editor is packed full of assets, but many of these belong to effects packs that you need to subscribe to (see 'Price' section). Usefully, you can set the All items drop-down to Free, so only free effects are displayed. You can use paid effects for free in your project, but there’s little point in doing this as a Movavi watermark pops up in the middle of the screen in your exported edited footage. Fortunately, there are plenty of animated effects and assets for you to enjoy using without paying extra for an effects pack, as you’ll see from my supporting video tour of Movavi Video Editor.

Movavi’s most powerful and useful post-production tools can be found by clicking on the Tools icon. Here you’ll find tools such as Chroma Key and Stabilisation, plus a time-saving Scene Detection tool that takes a long, rambling clip and automatically cuts it into separate clips when it notices a change in the scene. We’ll look at some of the key tools in the Performance section (below).

Movavi Video Editor 2026: Performance

To test Movavi Video Editor 2026, I decided to create a ‘day in the life’ video of model Maryna Sedin. I had shot some raw footage of Maryna dragging her suitcase full of clothes to London's Barbican Centre for a photo shoot, where I also interviewed her about her modelling career.

It was a simple matter to swipe the cursor over clips in the bin to preview their content, drag in the thumbnails to trim a clip’s start and end point, and then drag it into the timeline. I was then able to drag clips around in the timeline to swap their running order until I was happy with the unfolding story. I added parallel clips on multiple video layers, which enabled me to add cutaways that illustrate what the subject is talking about (as well as hiding cuts to the interview footage on the main video layer).

Editing clips on the Movavi timeline was very intuitive, especially as I’ve been using apps such as Final Cut Pro for years. However, one small behavioural detail did bug me. In Final Cut Pro, you can click anywhere in the timeline, and the playhead will jump instantly to this point. You can then tap the space bar and play the footage from that selected point in the timeline. With Movavi, you need to click on the duration bar above the timeline to manually reposition the playhead. This slowed me down quite a lot as I was used to the click-anywhere-in-the-timeline option from Final Cut Pro.

That small shortcoming aside, I was very impressed with Movavi’s AI-powered features as they saved the day in relation to my edit’s audio quality. When I’d interviewed Maryna, I’d forgotten to turn on my wireless mic’s noise cancellation feature. As a result, we could hear unwanted background sounds such as a cleaner hoovering in the distance. Maryna’s voice also sounded echoey thanks to reverberation from the location’s concrete walls.

Fortunately, the Sound autocorrect tools panel had an AI-powered Recording Studio tool. One click on this tool’s icon, and the background noise disappeared from Maryna’s audio track, and her voice sounded much clearer too! This tool did a much better job than Final Cut Pro’s Voice Isolation tool when applied to the same footage.

Another even more impressive AI-powered Movavi tool is the Auto subtitles feature. A few years back, it would take me many hours to listen to footage and then manually type up the subject’s speech into text. It only took a few seconds for Movavi’s AI-powered Auto subtitles tool to generate accurate subtitles from Maryna’s interview and place them above the appropriate footage in the timeline. I could then fine-tune any mistakes (of which there were few) and change the look of the captions in the Subtitles settings panel.

You can even choose an option that highlights each word as it is spoken by the subject - karaoke style. Final Cut Pro can also transcribe speech to captions, but I found that it was not as accurate as Movavi Video Editor. A few years ago I charged hundreds as a freelance video editor to create subtitles for a programme. Thanks to AI, this task takes minutes, so those lucrative subtitling gigs are well and truly over!

Another very useful AI-powered tool comes in the shape of motion tracking. You can drop a graphic onto the timeline and then use AI to make it track the movement of a subject on the main video layer. If the video clip isn’t on the main video layer, then the AI motion tracking feature isn’t available. This took me a while to work out, as you can place clips on multiple video layers above the main track, but AI will only motion track objects on main layer clips.

Movavi Video Editor 2026: Verdict

Today’s generation of video editors is well-used to the convenience of editing video on a computer, and free apps such as iMovie make it an inexpensive task. However, in the crowded field of non-linear video editing apps, Movavi Video Editor 2026 stands out thanks to a combination of powerful post-production tools and an intuitively designed and easy-to-master interface.

You then have the option to pay an additional subscription to gain access to Movavi Effects if you want to expand your choice of graphics, transitions, and music tracks, but as you’ll see from my supporting video, the basic version of Movavi is generously packed full of sophisticated post-production tools that will enable you to create eye-catching videos. And while there are free feature-packed video editing apps available, such as the extremely impressive DaVinci Resolve 21, Movavi Video Editor is much easier to master.

Alternatives

BenQ has revealed a new addition to its Creative Pro monitor line-up: the PD2732U. This 27‑inch 4K display has been designed for photographers, videographers and creatives who need a wide-gamut, color-accurate display. It boasts 99% Adobe RGB, 99% DCI‑P3, and 100% sRGB coverage – percentages that few other monitors can compete with, regardless of price. The Adobe RGB coverage is especially impressive, and it means on-screen colors can be more accurately matched to CMYK print output.

Every PD2732U is factory calibrated to an accuracy of Delta E <2, and is Calman Verified and Pantone Validated for additional color dependability. BenQ’s AQCOLOR Pilot calibration software enables hardware and software calibration management for long-term color accuracy. The PD2732U is also said to “ensure reliable color performance and brightness across the entire display, minimizing color deviation with advanced corner-to-corner uniformity correction”.

In addition to the display’s pro-grade image credentials, the PD2732U also features Thunderbolt 4 connectivity for single-cable video, data, and power delivery, along with Smart KVM with daisy‑chain support, enabling you to control multiple computers through a single monitor. Mac‑optimized color matching eliminates differences between Mac displays and the monitor – ideal when using the PD2732U alongside a MacBook. Each monitor is supplied with BenQ’s wireless Hotkey Puck that gives quick access to modes and settings.

The BenQ PD2732U is available to pre‑order at B&H for $699, which considering its superb color space coverage makes it a bit of a bargain. Alternatively, it can be bundled with BenQ’s Ergo Arm for a $50 discount. Retail availability at B&H starts on July 22, with Amazon and other retailers stocking the display from September 1.

Like many photographers, I like to make prints to adorn the walls at home. And some years ago I invested in a poster-sized printer so that I could do so at will.

Specifically, I got a Canon Pixma Pro 9000 Mark II, which was the 2009 version of a printer that hasn’t significantly changed from its 2006 release.

When I tried to print something this weekend with no success for the first time, I wasn’t sure what to do.

There are obvious steps that everyone goes through, obviously. Checking that all the ink tanks are full is step one. They weren’t, of course. It had been a few months, and I suspect a degree of evaporation may have played its part.

The current heatwave and the fact that I keep the printer upstairs won’t have helped matters. However, it was not a cheap printer – well over $500 – so I don’t mind forking out $30 for a set of replacements from a brand of compatible inks I have come to trust: Inkredible (unlike, sadly, some of the ‘compatible’ brands on Amazon).

Each of the ink tanks for this printer has a chip and the printer senses them. I’ve never had an issue with these, whereas some ‘compatible’ inks have proven not to be. Some will tell me I should continue using Canon’s own inks, but their price is somewhat off-putting by comparison.

Two days later, when the inks arrived, I swapped them out and reassuring lights indicated that the printer recognized them; however, it was still not inclined to print a page for me.

At this point, I had to resort to attempting to understand the printer’s problem via its only means of communication – an orange LED that flashes a number of times in sequence.

This felt positively archaic in an era where my portable battery pack has a small color display, but casting my mind back to 2006 (before the iPhone was announced) perhaps this wasn’t so unlikely.

I can connect to my computer, of course, and hope that the software understands the error, but that doesn’t actually solve it either. Plugging into my Mac did remind me of the printer’s age, though, with a dedicated USB-A cable forcing me to find an adapter for the USB-C ports on my computer.

My MacBook reported a print head error via the Print Center, and ChatGPT concurred when I described the flashing light. Unlike the computer, though, the AI chatbot wanted to help out – suggesting a load of things to try.

While every one of the eight ink colors is a small replaceable tank, the whole print head is attached beneath them and is also removable and replaceable.

The ever-sympathetic chatbot initially suggested a series of parts of the printer to clean – buttons, paper feeds and the like – all of which, it felt, could lead to the same issue.

Eventually, it decided that it was time to remove the print head – but before replacing it, suggested some ways to clean it. In other words, lint-free cloth and rubbing alcohol were additional investments that ChatGPT thought were worth consideration. Not to mention a lot of time.

Sadly, though, AI wasn’t totally on-side with my problem, wanting me to perform a nozzle check – which the printer was refusing to do because the print head wasn’t working.

After a lot of back-and-forth in a chat, though, it gave me odds (about 90%) of an electrical failure of the print head, which brings me to my next choice. Do I source a new one – there are compatible options out there, even if Canon ones are hard to come by – or is it time to call it quits?

I think the answer is starting to become apparent. I’ve already lost a good amount of money and time – and ended up with very inky fingers several times.

I was, I have to admit, impressed with the amount of knowledge that AI had to offer about the printer’s error messages given its age. But at this stage I start to measure the value of my time (no, really, it has some).

There is also a point at which being told “We’re getting there” or “That’s a good sign” by a cheery and positive AI is increasingly frustrating as a human. ChatGPT is a bot, after all, and doesn’t quite appreciate that getting eight different colors over your fingers every time you get all the tanks out to access the print head to try “one more thing” is a bit annoying.

And it takes a long, long time to clean printer ink off your fingers.

So the final question should perhaps be “What is the best large-format printer?” That is a question I’ll still trust to humans with experience, but I did appreciate AI lending a hand in making me feel that I won’t be slapping down the cash on a whim.