Andrew Reid

Yes this week.

Did you happen to receive an A7S III with faulty bluetooth for just over a grand?

And a Leica Q?

Maybe it will turn up in about 3 months speaking french?!

New set of pre-order cancellations for the US.

https://www.fujirumors.com/fujifilm-to-suspend-orders-for-gfx100rf-x100vi-and-x-m5-black-only/

Many more to come.

Whilst watching YouTube with my popcorn last night the thought did occur that Blackmagic probably can't exactly upend their manufacturing over night and move stuff to other countries on a whim, let alone Sony... and given how unstable the Fascist Regime of American Trade (FRAT) policies are, it would probably be a pretty silly business decision anyway to make any decision at all based at a time like this based on the real life Apprentice USA episodes airing daily that can come up with real laws that are either permanent or about as long-lived as a non-chlorinated Liz Truss lettuce.

Even the FRAT cabinet itself is almost as unstable as the economic circumstances they've created, with Elon probably on his way out in a similar manner to this...

1 hour ago, MrSMW said:

I won't be buying or changing anything this year

I'll believe it when I see it 😉

Who will take America's place on the global stage.

Clue...

It won't be Belgium.

He is a liability.

The tariffs could be back at any moment, he's giving the market a jump scare like he's in Scream 3.

Which means if you are China or Japan with trillions invested in the US and in dollars, you are likely to start selling and putting the money somewhere else.

Personally I am hoping they give it to me.

In the testing process we discovered some interesting special sauce, hence I have held off on the release to go through that as well... but this week it will be out along with some of the extras too.

Get your ALEXA LUTs ready 🙂

China holds nearly $1 trillion in US debt and could tank the bond market if they wanted to.

Indeed, they now might.

I wonder if Drump and his cronies even realised this basic economic fact before deciding on their trade war bullying move.

Or maybe it's a mistake to believe they even care about the country... And it's all about enriching themselves personally with some stock market manipulation.

Either way things could be about to get very nasty for the world economy.

Buy a camera now before the new prices hit.

14 hours ago, Marcio Kabke Pinheiro said:

And about Europe...it is not so far away from the USA insanity as it might appear.

The Le Pens got very close to govern France. The far-right is making inroads on Germany. @Emanuelcould talk about the Andre's Ventura "Chega" party on Portugal. Orbán is already in charge on Hungary, as Erdogan in Turkey. Millei (an idiot as crazy as Trump, or worse) is in charge of Argentina - with 55% below the poverty line. And I already talked about Brazil.

The far-right is a world cancer now.

And the centre-left parties are letting it spread and enabling it.

A lot of people are stupid, but a lot of them just feel that the traditional career politicians don't speak for them.

Then we have 4 or 5 years of this or that liberal party in power and nothing changes.

Where is Kamala Harris now?

How do you lose to a fucking convicted felon? How useless do you have to be?

The democrats are now holding little signs up in congress!

What is that achieving?

You can't play diplomacy games with a fascist thug.

It's one of the reasons Putin is so powerful, he had half of them round his little finger, whilst Russian influence & money was deeply embedded in western society.

The only way you remove a fascist dictator or a mafia from power is violence.

The US might be about to find that out at the next election.

In the meantime, this China trade-war is really ramping up towards a possible armed conflict, and not a lot of Trump voters realise the seriousness of what he's started.

1 hour ago, Ilkka Nissila said:

Instead, US sells services such as software and financial services to other regions, balancing the trade. This is of course not going to help them fight a world war because for that they would indeed need a manufacturing industry, which led to this dilemma.

Very good point about services.

So when Dump talks about terrible trade deficits with certain countries, did he forget about Amazon Web Services, Apple App Store, Netflix, VISA, Master Card and Cloudflare?

More to the point.. does he even know what they are? 🙂

Best way to fight fire with fire is for the rest of the world to kick out VISA and to sell all their reserve currency (USD)

Then the Americans would come grovelling to us instead of the other way round.

38 minutes ago, Snowfun said:

I’m not sure anyone would adopt that rather silly & superficial definition. “Buy local” is usually taken to mean that IFF a choice is available then one might reasonably decide to buy the one with fewer transportation costs, is supportive of a local economy and meets the needs of the consumer. Anyone naive enough to think that this applies to cameras - which are so obviously “global” it isn’t worth stating - possibly shouldn’t be contributing. As a relevant example I might look at Hifi - lots of options but certainly possible to “buy local” (thinking Sugden, Chord Electronics and Spendor in my own case). Or chickens. 

We are not talking about pork sausages though are we?

This is a topic about tariffs on cameras and cutting edge electronics.

So why mention it?

Your argument doesn't fit here, and I don't know what the point of it is.

So back on topic...

The US is a third of the global market for consumer electronics and professional cameras, and actually much more than a third for certain products and companies.

If this market was to vanish behind a nationalist, protectionist trade barrier then it won't matter how much you bang on about buying local, the country's economy and jobs will go through a catastrophic breakdown as the Americans are about to find out.

32 minutes ago, Snowfun said:

If an (unintended) consequence of all this nonsense is  “buy local and buy less” then that will, I think, be a good thing.

Not protectionism. Not jingoism. Not anti-globalisation. But nevertheless possibly better for the planet and for our own health & wellbeing. 

Buying local, if it means the complete destruction of the economy of China, Taiwan, Vietnam and Thailand will not be a good thing for the planet. It'll lead to WW3 and possibly even nuclear war. The uncultured twits in the white house don't understand this but often in history whenever you have a great depression, it leads to a military confrontation.

Trade is what binds us together and prevents a lot of fighting.

People should buy local as well as support jobs in Asia.

Buy as much as you can, it keeps the economy going.

The alternative is not worth thinking about.

In terms of the environment, there are a certain number of people on the planet - they are not going away. The damage has already been done. For the world's population to have any sort of quality of life they need to consume, eat well, have jobs, shelter, transport.

That should not come at the cost of the environment, but it does. Impossible situation. Technology can help but I think we're past the point of no return anyway.

I want to buy Asian made goods, like cameras, lenses, computers, audio gear, and until it is made down the road in a small village in the same quantities for the same price, which will never happen, I will continue to want less trade barriers between countries.

6 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

The uncertainty really defeats many of the stated purposes. If the goal is to promote American manufacturing, manufacturers need to know that the tariff will be in place for their entire company's history.

Yeah, it's all quite obvious to us but apparently not to Trump voters, who only know the goal is to promote American manufacturing but don't understand the reality.

The reality is that American manufacturing even when it's on US soil requires suppliers across borders, and all over the world. Raw materials that cannot be sourced in the US. Trading partners with cheaper labour - Mexico, Vietnam, China... And supply chains in Canada just across the border for automotive manufacturing and more...

So even when you have dismantled all of this, aside from the fact US manufacturing will collapse if you do, there's the clear-as-day problem of wage levels... It just isn't economical to make large volume electronics (or much else consumer-wise) in the US due to the average wage level vs places like China and Vietnam. Foxconn employ a city's worth of millions.

It's the big elephant in the room every time Trump bangs on about protecting American jobs and bringing manufacturing back home.

What is the cost to the consumer?

If he succeeds then consumers won't be buying much as it will be 1000% more expensive.

6 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

Even simple items like clothes take time to build large-scale manufacturing for--why would anyone invest in a factory if the tariff could be gone next year?

Yeah, can you imagine TSMC bringing their fabs over to the US... The world's most expensive relocation for what... zero political stability, massively higher wage bill, there isn't even the talent pool for stuff like semiconductor engineering - it's mainly in Asia. They will not convince their best people to leave Taiwan and go and live in a hostile environment for foreigners (sad to say that about the US, isn't it?)

And the other problem is that the US government, in particular Trump himself are making themselves look TOTALLY economically illiterate and completely untrustworthy in terms of managing the US economy, which scares off the investment even more.

6 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

Of course that's disregarding that the tariffs are also claimed to be leverage to get better deals (ie designed to be removed when a deal is struck) while simultaneously a source of federal revenue (ie designed to be permanent).

He wants maximum leverage for the upcoming talks with 50-odd countries.

The danger here is that the damage has already been done.

US untrustworthy.

Global supply chains and shipping disrupted in similar manner as COVID.

Inflation and supply problems beginning to mount up big style in only a short few days.

Trillions wiped off stocks.

And more shit... All for a supposably 'better bargaining position' in trade-talks.

Then there's still the chance that they will just end up fighting with China rather than striking a deal and the trade-war rumbles on for years, leading to a military confrontation and devastating unemployment and poverty all over the world, but especially in the US and China.

All because of one idiot and the idiots who thought voting for a convicted economically illiterate crook was a good idea.

Apparently all camera pre-orders in the US will be cancelled in the coming days, most already have.

Due to the tariffs, retailers can't predict the unit cost when an item actually ships from Asia.

So they can't honour any of the pre-orders.

Millions of $ wiped off retailers books.

Hundreds of lost customers.

And this is the same for everything... cameras, graphics cards, games consoles, Nintendo Switch 2.

Nobody has any idea of what the actual price will be from one week to the next.

Currently imports are stacking up at the ports.

Cars stuck on ships.

I feel sorry for those in the US who didn't vote for this. You are in for a shocking time.

They had the chance to prevent WW2 but wimped out of it.

Similarly MPB have the chance to prevent WW2 with me but continue to perform a cover-up on the a7s III situation.

The order was simply nerfed. It's vanished.

22 hours ago, ND64 said:

4k raw wouldn't need line skipping and pixel binning and so much compression that look inferior to heavily compressed h.265 if SD Express wasn't such a flop of a standard.

It's full 6K readout in full frame 4K innit?

SD UHS II is fine for 4K H.265.

Even at 50Mbit it looks nice.

This is a Nikon Df basically with the new flexible colour profiles.

My Z8 is made in Thailand by the way so if this is the same, price could be +36% +20% after import to US.

Which makes a used Nikon Df a much better option there.

At least when all those cameras were lost we knew why and how it happened.

Whereas in this case it remains a complete mystery. Was it the Russians? Did DHL fancy a Leica Q? Did MPB put the wrong label on it and now it's in Poland? Did the French have any involvement in the early stages? We'll never be any the wiser.

I sense a cover up over the a7s III as well.

They are saying that there's no audit trail, no reason why it happened, no indication of when, and no staff name attached to anything.

My theory is that somebody tested a customer return who complained about the bluetooth, and also couldn't get it working and listed it as spares & repairs.

Then a manager came along and said you fucking idiot, that's how bluetooth is supposed to not work.

There's nowt wrong with it, back onto the website it goes.

And here's muggins thinking he has a bargain...

OK fair enough but be honest about what happened, don't do the cover up which rubs insult into injury.

I also think that 3 major fuck-ups in as many months is too much.

I have lost completely the high trust I used to have in them. If you can't be sure whether a sales contract will be kept to or not, or whether a delivery will arrive, or whether I'll have to wait 2 months for a refund, it does make me think twice about spending another 10 grand with them.

4 hours ago, newfoundmass said:

It's a testament to the Democrats and their incompetence that twice they lost to a swindler and con man because they were unable to convince a majority of the electorate that the racist billionaire doesn't give a fuck about them. 

I agree but it's hard to reason with someone with an IQ of 80...And there's a lot of them.

If the hatred for guys like Biden runs so deep with half the country, again a wake-up call is deserved and well overdue in the form of 30% inflation which Biden had at 2.9% but Trump will turn up to catastrophic house repossession causing figures.

The numbers are based on some crazy ideas. To name but one tiny example... If a country imports diamonds to the US and that trade amounts to more than that sum total that country buys in turn from the US this has been factored into the sums.

Does Trump expect the US to suddenly conjure up a diamond industry... and coffee, and so on.

Stuff which literally doesn't exist or doesn't grow, at least in the quantities they need.

The impact on inflation in the US is going to be staggering, and that African country with the big exports will simply sell the diamonds to somewhere else and the US will have achieved nothing.

In terms of electronics, even if they make the shit in Texas they still need the raw resources. Plus the impact of US wages on a factory the size needed to satisfy the US market for phones alone is staggering. The product will cost an incredible amount more.

Does he also expect the Japanese camera industry to uproot from Asia and plant itself on his doorstep?

It's completely unrealistic to do and undesirable for US consumers even if it happens as the prices will have to go up by 3-5x or more to pay the workers US wages.

Anyone still under the magic spell of nationalism thinking Trump is so great is about to get a massive fucking wake up call when they look at their bank account.

It's actually worse.

Over 50% on China in sum total of all Trump's tariffs.

If you voted for this and think it's a good idea you need your head examined.

12 hours ago, gt3rs said:

Really impressive and cool.

The only thing that bothered me is the slow panning back and forth between actors when they were talking because they did not want to use two cameras and have cuts (breaking the one take choice). I started to notice and then it become more bothersome. I find a bit unnatural, as a human you would quickly switch your look to who is speaking and not this slow switch. 

I think it's a compromise but far better to have the one-take per episode than the usual cutting.

There's nothing natural about cutting really.

Our eyes don't do it.

If anything, the slow panning between actors replicates our mind tuning into one person over the other at various times, and we do that in real life quite a bit.

I'd like a consumer camera from them, under $1k.

They've done enough pro stuff now, big and heavy stuff, sensor in a box, you name it.

But there's no small camera with autofocus and IBIS.

Blackmagic could add in their unique features and it would rule.

Internal BRAW + ND + their image quality all in a consumer friendly mirrorless camera form factor with similar build quality to Fuji.

I also think they should do a modern spin on the original BMCC 2.5K. The Cinema DNG image from that was cinema on a stick. If only they'd do a new version with the same or similar sensor, with autofocus, IBIS, and an EVF, plus small, interchangeable battery + CFexpress slot all for under $2k.

We'd finally have that next Digital Bolex type camera.

The main camera manufacturing countries just got slapped by Tango-man.

China - 34%
Vietnam - 46%
Taiwan - 32%
Japan - 24%
Thailand - 36%

Hope all the ones who voted for this enjoy their new electronics prices 👍

The plan is to launch it in Tokyo and invite everyone over to see the S9 Barbie Edition (China only)