Stacked sensor related patents continue to roll out from Canon. Canon News has uncovered the latest in a long list of stacked sensor patents.

Canon News breaks down the patent:

In another patent application describing stacked BSI sensors, canon looks to solve problems with high melting point metal is moved from being on the sensor substrate to only on the peripheral circuit substrate.  They are concerned that the high melting point metal will diffuse into the photo diodes collecting image data. Read the full breakdown

It’s worth noting that this sort of technology is especially important for mirrorless camera applications as it improves performance as well an improved ability to collect light at “high incident angles” says Canon News.

The-Digital-Picture has completed their review of the Canon EF-M 18-150mm f/3.5-6.3 IS STM, a superzoom for Canon APS-C mirrorless cameras. The EF-M 18-150mm f/3.5-6.3 IS STM was announced on September 15, 2016.

From TDP:

Superzoom lenses typically represent a compromise between the convenience of a single lens with a diverse array of uses and the image quality tradeoffs necessary to make the lens compact and affordable. With its small size, light weight and broad focal length range, the EF-M 18-150mm is heavy on convenience with surprisingly good image quality, making it light on compromise, and… it’s also relatively light on the wallet. Read the full review

It looks like this lens continues with the good value performance of previous EF-M lenses.

Canon EF-M 18-150mm f/3.5-6.3 IS STM at B&H Photo

Canon has released their 2018 Q1 financial results.

Some photo gear related highlights:

• Increase market share through sales expansion of new products, including mirrorless models
• Improve product mix, and new product composition to raise profitability
• As for interchangeable-lens cameras, we expect the market to continue to contract at a modest rate.
• In the first quarter, although unit sales in the same period last year were at a high level, resulting from the resolution of shortages that arose following the Kumamoto earthquake in 2016, we posted 1.05 million in unit sales, limiting our decline to 3%.
• As the market and our own sales were in line with our plan in the first quarter, we left our projection for the full year unchanged and still expect the market to decline 4% to 11 million units and our own sales to be 5.5 million units, which is in line with last year.
• From a profit perspective, by raising the proportion of sales generated by new products and solidly expanding sales of high amateur models, we will improve product mix.
• This is part of our full-lineup strategy to further stimulate demand for interchangeable-lens cameras and our aim to capture demand from users looking to move up in class in the future. Under this strategy, we consider the EOS M50 to be a driver of sales. It is the first of our entry-class models to feature 4K video and it incorporate the same AF functionality found in higher end models. This camera also realizes operability that makes it easy to enjoy taking pictures even for beginners. Through these kinds of new products we will stimulate demand and effect improvement in our market share.

The full breakdown of Canon’s 2018 Q1 financials is after the break.

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The “massive update” to Adobe Lightroom Classic CC released earlier this month came with a lot of bugs that made a lot of the photography community quite angry, especially considering people are now paying monthly for the software.

We’ve had a lot of comments and questions from readers about Lightroom Classic CC and if there are any other options for software. We generally shy away from making recommendations like this, but it’s inexcusable that Lightroom would suffer from the types of bugs it has after so many years of development.

From Adobe:

“We heard your feedback and felt that parts of the release didn’t uphold the level of quality that we hold ourselves to. We’re happy to report that these issues were resolved and now available for immediate download. Some of the issues resolved included converting presets, sorting and copying/pasting profiles, translation errors, along with crash fixes.”

Read more…

We’ve now heard from two different people, that two different retailers are saying that the PowerShot G7 X Mark II is listed as discontinued in their computer systems.

The current PowerShot G7 X Mark II was announced February 17, 2016, so it makes sense that a replacement may be coming soon. The camera is now well past 2 years old. The original PowerShot G7 X lasted for 520 days before the announcement of the PowerShot G7 X Mark II.

We haven’t seen any other leaks or information about a potential PowerShot G7 X Mark III, but we have been told that at least one G series PowerShot camera was coming in 2018.

We’ve been told by a few retailers that the PowerShot G7 X series has been the best selling of the refreshed “G” series of cameras.