Gear Reviews

Traditionally, shooting with an anamorphic lens has always come with its set of hurdles. While having the cinematic squeeze is nice, battling with the size and weight can be rather unpleasant. Not to mention the need for diopters just to reach a decent close-focus distance. And on top of these, you have to choose between paying an exorbitant price or settling for a budget lens with bad optical quality, just to name a few. This is where the DZOFilm Arcana series comes in. 

A 55mm lens with an aperture ring solved a workflow problem on the Nikon Z f that had annoyed one wedding shooter for years. That single feature, plus a focal length that sits just past the standard 50mm, is worth a look.

Sony's new FE 100-400mm arrives with an f/8 aperture on the long end, and that single number will push a lot of shooters to walk right past it. That aperture is also the reason the lens exists, because it lets Sony build a 400mm you can carry all day and handhold without a second thought.

The Vision Prime 1 (VP-1) series full frame cine lenses were originally launched by Sirui back in February 2025, with the first batch of lenses covering all the mid-range focal lengths: the 24mm T1.4, 35mm T1.4, and 50mm T1.4. These releases not only offer great value options to the filmmaking enthusiast community, but also aim at solving traditional pain points by reshaping how we think about lenses and taking advantage of the modern camera setup. 

Canon's RF 24-105mm f/2.8 L IS USM Z carries a price near $3,000 and a body large enough to reshape what you pack. Deciding between this lens and the more familiar RF 24-70mm is one of the harder calls a Canon shooter faces right now.

A constant f/1.8 mid-range zoom on an APS-C body gets you close to the look of a 24-70mm on full frame, with less weight and a smaller footprint. That kind of flexibility is exactly what keeps pulling shooters back.

A monochrome-only camera that costs more than its color twin sounds like a hard sell, until you see what a dedicated black and white sensor actually does to an image. The Ricoh GR IV Monochrome strips out the color filter array entirely, and the results push well past what a converted color file can offer.

The Lumix S9 launched as one of the smallest full-frame mirrorless cameras you can buy, and then sat there without a lens small enough to prove the point. Now a metal pancake the size of a lens cap has arrived in L-mount, and it fills that gap.

The Fujifilm X-H2 packs a 40-megapixel sensor, in-body stabilization, and a modular design that accepts a cooling fan and a broadcast-level file transfer grip, yet it sits in the shadow of the cheaper X-T5. That gap says a lot about who each camera is actually for.

Most photographers rank a macro lens near the bottom of their wish list, filed under a specialty they'll get around to someday. That instinct sells short a piece of glass that can carry travel work, portraits, and landscapes all at once.

The biggest weakness of Sony's newest high-resolution camera turns out to be everything you expected of it before you ever picked it up. Expectations, not hardware, set the trap, and understanding that shift changes how you shoot with a resolution-first body in a market crowded with do-it-all machines.

In my previous review of the Rogeti T32MAX With C32GK + RG-1, I highlighted its strengths as a well-designed, precision tripod that solved conventional issues I had long accepted as unavoidable compromises. While the T32Max excels in adaptability and modularity, it falls short for low-angle shooting because Rogeti chose to eliminate leg angle selectors to prioritize better overall stability. The only way to achieve low perspectives was to invert the entire center column, which can be cumbersome and slow in the field. Long story short, the team at Rogeti reached out and offered me the chance to look at their patented solution: the C32BK, a center column with an integrated mini tripod designed specifically to address this low-angle limitation.

The ASUS Zenbook Duo is a laptop with two 14-inch OLED screens instead of one, and for six months it has been trying to solve the single thing I hate most about working away from my desk. I have never been able to edit on one screen. At home, there are two big panels in front of me, one for the image and one for everything else, I want the same on the go. 

The JOYROOM PODIX 140W 5-Port Desktop GaN Charger is designed to eliminate your desktop's cable spaghetti. This compact cube offers five charging ports, including two built-in retractable USB-C cables, a 140 W total output, and a live LCD display showing real-time power draw per port. The unit keeps everything safe via its smart recognition and intelligent thermal control, all in something the size of a Rubik's Cube.

Today, let’s get close. Like, really close, with the new Laowa Aksen Ultra Macro zooms.

A 135mm f/1.8 that retails for under $1,000 is not something you expect to perform like a premium lens. The 7Artisans 135mm f/1.8 for L-Mount does exactly that, and it changes the math for anyone who has wanted this focal length but balked at the cost.

A cinema camera that records 6K internal raw for $2,200 sounds like an easy call against a rival that costs more than double. The Nikon ZR undercuts the Sony FX5 so aggressively that price alone seems to settle the argument, until storage enters the picture and the math shifts.

The Olight ArkPro Ultra is a flat, pocketable everyday-carry flashlight that tries to do something most lights do not: put four different light sources in one slim body. Alongside the usual white flood and a longer-throwing white spot, it adds an ultraviolet output and a green laser. I have been carrying it as a daily light, and this review is about what that is actually like, not just what the box promises.

One professional replaced nearly every prime lens in his kit with a single zoom, and after a couple of years, he'd buy it again the moment it broke. That kind of commitment to one piece of glass is rare, especially when the glass costs around $3,300.

Picking between two Canon telephoto zooms for wildlife comes down to a question that sounds simple and isn't: do you want more reach or better glass? One gives you 800mm in a package that's hard to match anywhere else, and the other gives you L-series quality with a wider low end.

A 12 to 20mm zoom range on a full frame camera pulls in a field of view most lenses can only dream of, and pairing that with a constant f/2.8 aperture opens doors for astrophotography and low-light work. Tamron built its new 12-20mm f/2.8 around exactly that combination, and it arrives with a shorter name and a longer feature list than the brand's older lenses.

A $275 lens outscoring an $850 one on nearly every practical count is the kind of result that changes how you shop for an 85mm portrait prime. The Nikkor 85mm f/1.8 S built its reputation on being a premium f/1.8 option, and now Viltrox is aiming straight at it with a smaller, cheaper alternative.

Sony's new FX5 records 16-bit XOCN raw internally, a codec that until now lived only in the Burano, Venice, and Venice 2. Squeezing that into a compact cinema body reshapes what you can expect from a camera you can hand-hold on a sidewalk.

When three cameras are on the chopping block and only one gets to stay, the choice reveals a lot about how you actually shoot. The Canon R6V, up against the C50, the C80, and the R6 Mark III, ended up winning that fight for reasons that have less to do with specs on paper and more to do with what a camera lets you do in the field.

Huawei's smartphone imaging innovation has come a long way since the introduction of XMage color science four years ago. The Pura series, previously known as the P series, has held its title as a photography flagship for even longer, consistently packing in all the greatest imaging technology. This year is no different with the introduction of the Pura 90s Pro Max. Huawei combines its latest True-to-Color 2.0 sensor with an industry-leading, ultra-large-sensor telephoto camera, pushing the imaging envelope to new heights, offering even more flexibility for users to express themselves through their unique perspective.

A 135mm f/1.8 full frame autofocus lens for $690 undercuts every rival on the market by a wide margin, and until recently, a lens this fast at this focal length simply didn't exist at this price. For portrait and event shooters chasing that tight, wildly out-of-focus look, the math suddenly changes.

A lens can hit every spec on your wishlist and still leave you flat when you actually shoot with it. The Sigma 15mm f/1.4 DC is a case study in that gap between numbers and feeling.

Recently, I had the chance to try out the new Wacom MovinkPad Pro 14. It wasn't that long ago that I experimented with Wacom's One 13 Touch. Although the MovinkPad Pro 14 isn't built specifically for photographers, the upgrade in my experience over the Wacom One Touch was significant. As an adventure guide and photographer, I travel to a minimum of four continents a year, and the portability of the MovinkPad Pro 14 really does draw me in past the drawbacks of pushing it outside its native operating system or purpose.

For years the honest answer to "is the phone camera good enough?" came with an asterisk. Good enough in nice light. Good enough if you did not zoom. Good enough until the sun went down. I have carried an iPhone 17 Pro Max since launch weekend, and after nine months of pointing it at nearly every situation I run into, the asterisk is mostly gone. This is the first iPhone where the answer to "can it handle that?" was just yes, across reach, dark, wide, close, and the kind of dramatic sky I cannot stop photographing.

A full frame pancake lens that costs around $200, mounts autofocus, and shrinks a Sony body down to something that reads as a point-and-shoot sounds like it has to give something up. The Viltrox 26mm f/2.8 EVO Edition FE gives up a little, but far less than the price and size suggest.

The Bluetti Elite 400 is a 3,840 Wh portable power station that rolls, and that second detail turns out to matter almost as much as the first. This is a nearly 4 kWh LiFePO4 battery with a 2,600 W pure sine wave inverter, built into a case with luggage wheels and a telescoping handle, and it is aimed squarely at the gap between the little 1,000 Wh boxes you carry with one hand and the 100-pound bricks you never actually move. That gap is exactly where a lot of real-world power lives: a computer you do not want to lose in an outage, a fridge to keep cold when the grid goes down, a campsite to run, and a permanent pile of batteries and devices that need charging.

Pancake lenses promise to shrink your camera down to something you'll actually carry, but the gap between the marketing and real-world performance can be wide. Five slim options exist for Fujifilm X-mount cameras, and their prices, quality, and quirks vary far more than their similar shapes suggest.

The Fujifilm X half is a machine for time travel, and the destination is roughly 1997. It takes the experience of a cheap, cheerful point-and-shoot film camera, the kind you took on school trips and to parties and then left in a drawer, and rebuilds the whole thing in digital form: the vertical half-frame photos, the wind-on lever, the roll you have to finish before you can see anything, even the little date stamp burned into the corner. It is not trying to make better pictures than your phone. It is trying to make taking pictures fun again, the specific analog kind of fun a lot of us have not felt since we were kids, and against my expectations, it absolutely succeeds.

Two 85mm portrait lenses, one costing $1,948 and the other $569, produce photos so close in sharpness that even a 200% crop of a model's eye barely separates them. That kind of price gap between near-identical results forces a real question about what you're actually paying for when you buy first-party glass.

The Nikkor Z 85mm f/1.8 S came out in 2019 as the only 85mm option on Nikon's mirrorless system, and today it sits in a crowded field where third-party glass costs a third as much. That single shift, from sole option to premium holdout, is the whole story behind whether this lens still deserves a spot on your list in 2026.

If you shoot long exposures at night, you know the frustration — your intervalometer dangling from your camera, swinging in the breeze, pulling on the cable. Not good. The Ruggard RTC-10 Timer-Remote Case (Standard) fixes that with a padded holder that straps directly to your tripod leg. It works great, with one Velcro gripe we'll get to shortly.

A 12-20mm zoom at f/2.8 sits right in the sweet spot for astrophotography, wide enough to swallow the Milky Way and fast enough to pull in faint starlight. Most shooters reach for a prime when the sky gets dark, which makes a zoom that can keep pace worth a real look.

For my photo tour in Iceland, I wanted to go lightweight. I had my eye on the new Think Tank FocusPoint 30L because it just looks great. Amazingly, my gear did fit in this compact photo backpack, and I took it with me to Iceland. Let me tell you about my experiences.

About six months ago, PolarPro sent me their new Portra filter. On their website it states, "Inspired by the look and feel of Portra 400 film… the Portra Filter blends color tone, diffusion, and glare reduction into one optical filter for a finished look." Hmm, sorry, it looks nothing like Portra 400 film. And I hadn't even put the filter on my camera at this point. I simply looked at the sample photos on their website, and thought about all the photos I've shot on Portra film.

Nikon sells three different 35mm prime lenses for the Z mount, and picking between them comes down to details that specs alone won't reveal. The gap between the Nikon 35mm f/1.4 and the Nikon 35mm f/1.8 S is smaller than the labels suggest.

An 800mm equivalent lens that fits in a hand and a 1,000mm equivalent monster share the same day out on the Welsh coast. That kind of reach used to mean carrying gear you could barely lift, and the shift toward smaller sensors covering it is one of the more interesting developments in wildlife photography right now.

Every desk has one ugly corner: the gray knot of chargers and power bricks that no cable management ever truly tames. The Anker Nano Power Strip (10-in-1, 70W, Clamp) clamps to your desk edge and swallows that knot whole, and after a month running my entire charging setup off it, I'm not going back.

Fujifilm's original XF16-55mm f/2.8 lens has long been considered one of the best in the X-mount lineup, and is a lens I've owned and loved to use for many years. I know from personal experience that it's truly one of the best, whether discussing sharpness, detail, autofocus, build quality, or usability.

Everybody loves a good pancake. A pancake lens, that is. Though some pancake lenses sacrifice quality for the sake of size, this new EVO lens begs to differ. 

A 15-year-old camera with no USB-C charging, no eye sensor, and dated video specs still earns a spot in a working photographer's bag for a trip to the Italian coast. That says something about what actually keeps a camera in rotation years after its spec sheet stops mattering.

Picking one full frame camera for travel means weighing color, size, stabilization, and price against each other, and the differences rarely show up on a spec sheet. Three cameras in the same price range can feel like completely different tools once you actually carry them through a city all day.

Impostor syndrome hits almost every creative person at some point, and if you shoot photos, you know the feeling: you look at work you admire and wonder why you even bother picking up a camera. Jesse Senko has a surprisingly practical answer to that spiral, and it comes from an unlikely source.

For years, Nikon's f/1.8 S-line lenses stood almost alone: premium optics at a maximum aperture where you rarely find premium anything. That comfortable spot is now under real pressure, and a head-to-head test shows exactly how much.

I've been looking for new ways to exhibit my photo and video work, ways that aren't tied to white walls or interior spaces. That search led me toward projectors, and I found one that fits. The appeal of something untethered is obvious in the fact that you can take your work almost anywhere. I initially expected I'd need a separate power station, but instead I found a quality projector with a built-in battery, making the whole setup far simpler than I'd imagined.