10 Dec
Calumet Photographic just announced their shipping cut-off’s for the holiday season –
Each day’s OneShot runs from midnight to midnight (CST) or until the item sells out (whichever comes first), and then it’s over. If you miss purchasing a OneShot special, you’ve missed it. But Calumet tells us, “there will be many more offers in the future.”
2 Oct
Leica’s surprise announcement of the Leica S2 blows away every other press release coming out of Photokina or elsewhere in the photo universe. Full-frame DSLRs are cool, but a 37.5-megapixel medium-format sensor that’s 56% larger (30×45 mm) than the so-called competition, and in a smaller body no less, is freakin’ awesome. The Leica S2 actually delivers on what BestPhotoGear relentlessly rants about — offer a bigger chip — and if you’ve been following our rants, you know it’s the size of the chip, NOT the megapixels, that matters most when it comes to image quality. Not to mention, the glass in FRONT of the chip. 
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The Leica S2 is cool to look at as well. Similar in style to Leica’s classic R8/R9 SLR cameras, it is clean looking and understated. Buttons, toggles, and switches are minimal, and the menus displayed on the camera’s three-inch 460,000-dot LCD are as simple as those found on Leica’s first DSLR venture, the Module R. (Yes, we had to go and kill your buzz by mentioning the R — sorry!) The new camera, designed and built in Germany, features an all-metal body that is both dust and waterproof.
While frame-per-second burst-rate figures haven’t been released, Leica claims the new camera is twice as fast as Hasselblad’s H-series cameras, which depending on the model can capture images slightly better than one frame-per-second.
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To compliment the new camera, Leica has also introduced seven bayonet-mount S-series lenses – a 24mm ultra-wide, 35mm wide, 70mm standard lens, 100mm ‘portrait’ lens, 120 mm macro, 180mm telephoto, and a 30mm tilt/shift lens. Although autofocus in design, manual focusing with electronic focus-confirmation is also possible with each of the S-series optics. Like the S2 camera body, the new lenses are also water and dustproof. The 30mm T/S is, of course, fully manual focus.
Aside from a conventional focal-plane shutter in the camera body for wider-aperture lenses, each of the Leica-S optics also contains an internal leaf-shutter to enable high-speed flash sync up to 1/4000th-second.
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Images can be captured in a choice of DNG, RAW, and/or JPEG formats onto either CompactFlash (CF) or SDHC memory cards. According to Leica you can store up to 400 RAW-format images on a 32GB card. An optional vertical grip that features a second shutter release, control wheel, and space for a second battery will also be available for the new camera. The exact price of the new camera is yet to be announced, but we expect it to be close to a billion dollars and worth every penny.
