Sunday, September 20, 2026

Canon and Sony both closed real gaps this week. The R8 Mark II finally gets in-body stabilisation, the biggest complaint about the original body, and ships in late October at $1,899. Sony's new 400mm F4.5 and 600mm F6.3 GM primes land the same story from the other direction: full G Master build, weather sealing and teleconverter compatibility in bodies under a kilogram, at a fraction of the price of the faster F2.8 and F4 versions. Wildlife and travel photographers who priced themselves out of Sony's flagship glass now have a real option, and Nikon Rumors says a Z5IIC is coming next week to answer both.

The Hasselblad X2D II got a strong review from Cameralabs this week: 100 megapixels, a terabyte of built-in storage, and an HDR display approach the reviewer rated ahead of the field. But a separate report has reviewer David Imel saying Hasselblad only offered him a review unit if he agreed to hit a list of supplied talking points, with minor negatives allowed. Worth remembering next time a review reads a little too clean, on any brand.

Photography said goodbye to Ian Berry this week, the Magnum photographer who was the sole independent witness to the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre and spent eight decades behind a camera. The Gordon Parks Foundation marked 20 years with a New York retrospective built from the memories of people who knew him. Both are reminders of what documentary photography is actually for. Meanwhile the legal system kept colliding with photographers' work in less comfortable ways: a Texas court ruled AI-generated child sexual abuse material is protected speech, and Meta is facing a class action over scraping Instagram photos to train a facial recognition system for its smart glasses. Different fights, same theme: the law has not caught up with what gets done with a photograph once it's online.

Next week brings Viltrox's four new L-mount lenses on 22 September and Nikon's promised Z5IIC announcement. Expect full hands-on verdicts on the R8 II and Sony's new superteles to start landing too.