Chemistry of Envy

20/08/2022

While I don't set my expectations particularly high for anime involving Netflix, Edgerunners is different. It comes from Studio Trigger, the studio behind Kill la Kill, and whose co-founder created Gurren Lagann. These are two of some of the most popular and well-known anime series (and two of my personal favorites).

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners hits Netflix in September.

18/08/2022

For years, Apple has steadily revealed how the ARM-based chips in its mobile phones were catching up in performance to the beefier silicon you’d find inside a laptop or desktop — in 2018, the company claimed its new iPad Pro was faster than 92 percent of portable PCs. At some point, it seemed inevitable that Apple would turn the more efficient chips into the primary processors for its Mac computers, too.

You can tell based on this graph with an unlabeled Y axis.

16/08/2022

The big streaming series from Marvel and Star Wars take all the headlines, but since its debut, Disney Plus has also slowly become a service stuffed with animated shorts. They… vary in quality. Some are shameless examples of brand synergy, like when Loki or Billie Eilish hang out with the Simpsons for a few painful minutes at a time. But if you dig a little deeper, there’s some great stuff, including some classic-style Mickey Mouse shorts, a refreshing take on Star Wars, and a surprisingly sweet series about Baymax from Big Hero 6. Now, you can add I Am Groot to that short list of shorts.

The name says it all.

14/08/2022

We first got a glimpse at the stop-motion film through a short teaser at the beginning of the year. It stars Ewan McGregor as Cricket and David Bradley as Geppetto, with Gregory Mann in the titular role. Del Toro — best known for films like The Shape of Water, Crimson Peak, and Pan’s Labyrinth — is co-directing Pinocchio alongside Mark Gustafson, and he has previously described the movie as something of a passion project.

12/08/2022

This morning, Disney released a new trailer for Andor, the next big Star Wars series on Disney Plus — and with it comes news that the show has been delayed by nearly a month. Andor was previously pegged for a premiere on August 31st, but the new clip says that it will debut with a “three-episode premiere September 21st.” The show is a prequel to a prequel, taking place before the events of the film Rogue One, which itself was set before the first Star Wars movie. It will once again star Diego Luna in the titular role of Cassian Andor, while the trailer also shows off the return of Forest Whitaker as Saw Gerrera.

A slight delay.

10/08/2022

I can only hope Warner Bros. Discovery wasn’t as cruel when it canceled the already completed Batgirl film this week. But the company certainly wasn’t kind. Early reports claimed the film, expected to premiere exclusively on HBO Max, was canceled because it was of such poor quality it was “irredeemable,” as one source told the New York Post. Later in the day, a much more plausible reason for the film’s vaulting appeared. According to Variety, the film was tucked away, never to be seen, not because it was a bad movie but because the massive entity now known as Warner Bros. Discovery wanted a tax write-off. That’s what happens in a megamerger. Potentially interesting projects — anything that bothers the biggest exec in the room — get canceled or delayed or shoved into a vault somewhere, never to see the light of day.

The one villain Batgirl couldn’t beat was the megamerger.

23/07/2022

TheThe second half of 2018 will be remembered as a momentous time for the camera world because Canon and Nikon, two of the most storied companies in the industry, finally got serious about mirrorless cameras. They both launched new full-frame mirrorless cameras with equally new mount systems and lenses that both hope will carry them long into the future. Nikon launched the Z7 and Z6, a duo with specs clearly designed to challenge Sony’s Alpha A7R III and A7 III cameras. Canon released the EOS R with an impressive set of fast lenses to go along with it. It’s clear that both companies recognize mirrorless as the future of their prosumer camera products — even if these three cameras borrow more than a little from the companies’ DSLRs.

As they charge in, Nikon and Canon are hoping they can disrupt and chip away at Sony’s dominance of the full-frame mirrorless market. A generous head start now finds Sony on its third generation of professional mirrorless cameras that excel at both stills and 4K video. So the legacy camera makers have a lot to prove. After spending a good amount of time with all three cameras, I’m very impressed by these first swings. The Z6 and EOS R are upgrades for photo hobbyists and pros who want a well-rounded but familiar full-frame camera, while the Z7 is more suited to people who demand the amount of data and cropping flexibility that its high megapixel count can deliver. If you’ve got a Nikon D850 and want something lighter, it could make for a natural switch. But everyone else — assuming you know you want to go full frame — will be fine with the Z6 or EOS R, as they offer enough resolution for basically any scenario.

The EOS R, Z6, and Z7 are already putting up a good fight against Sony.

22/07/2022

TheThe common line of thinking when it comes to image sensors is “bigger is always better.” You can see evidence of this in all kinds of cameras, from smartphones, which have combined computational photography with ever larger image sensors to increase quality, to interchangeable lens DSLRs and mirrorless cameras, which use larger sensors to provide better low light image quality, greater dynamic range, and shallower depths of field.

So you’d be forgiven for thinking that the biggest sensor you can afford is going to give you the best images you can capture. Fujifilm’s new GFX 50R offers one of the biggest image sensors you can find: a 51.4-megapixel medium format chip that’s nearly twice as large as full-frame 35mm DSLR. But after spending a few weeks shooting with the GFX 50R, which crams that sensor into a camera body that’s smaller and less expensive than other medium format options, I’ve learned that biggest isn’t always best.

Fujifilm’s GFX 50R looks new, but is familiar underneath

21/07/2022

fIf you had to solve a CAPTCHA challenge every time you opened an app on your phone, would you still use that app? That’s how I’ve felt using Sony’s new a6400, where wading through pages of settings and submenus to change vital settings makes an otherwise solid mirrorless camera unreasonably frustrating to use.

The Sony a6400 is a follow-up to the three-year-old a6300, and shares some features with the more expensive a6500. It has a lot of things going for it — like reliably good image quality and a fast hybrid AF system — but those positive traits are buried under a bedrock of convoluted menus and awkward ergonomics. Everything great about this camera is hidden under a menu, overshadowed by caveats, or not present at all.

The a6400 is a good camera thwarted by messy menus

20/07/2022

veI’ve always hated the gimmicky and mostly meaningless tech-jargony term “disruptor,” but that really is the role Blackmagic plays in the film industry. It makes cameras that shoot footage with a quality that approaches giants like RED and ARRI but at a fraction of the cost. The Pocket Cinema Camera line has become a favorite among indie producers, studios, and DPs, and the latest iteration shoots at a staggering 6K resolution and starts at just $2,500 instead of the tens of thousands of dollars those other cameras command. It’s incredible, but it’s certainly not for everybody, and it isn’t designed to be.

Blackmagic’s latest camera ups the ante on resolution and image quality.

19/07/2022

cameras are trending toward the endangered species list. For typical, day-to-day photos and videos, there’s the smartphone. If you want to capture action, there’s the GoPro, and if you want to make art, there are higher-end cameras with larger sensors. Point-and-shoots aren’t totally dead, though. They’re still popular with tourists who are trying to keep weight and bulk to a minimum. And then there are vloggers.

Social media celebs, YouTube personalities, and influencers in the worlds of travel, fashion, and food often need to be able to shoot photos and videos at a higher quality than their phones can deliver while keeping their camera small and unobtrusive. It seems that the $1,299.99 Sony RX100 Mark VII is aimed at that crowd.

The RX100 Mark VII finally has a microphone jack

18/07/2022

I didn’t think my current socially distant life was fun enough for an Instax camera when I received Fujifilm’s new Instax Square SQ1 a few weeks ago. There were no friends laughing on my couch or tables full of hard seltzer and chips. I was alone, with no Instagram-worthy moments that a Polaroid frame would make cute. Yet, as I began taking photos of my office-apartment-studio-hybrid space, one thing became clear: a simple camera that wraps images in an iconic frame can make even the mundane look Instagram-worthy.

The Instax Square SQ1 is Fujifilm’s newest point-and-shoot Instax camera.