Fujifilm Professional is to discontinue one of its slower moving lines of film, from September 2009 production of Fujicolor Pro 800Z will cease. The company has a limited supply of the film in stock, enough to satisfy demand until approximatively November 2009.

Fujifilm’s Product Manager for Professional Film, Russ Gunn, explained the decision: “We have decided to remove all formats of Pro 800Z from our range due to low sales volume. By streamlining our selection of Professional film we can ensure our strong selling lines are protected.”

Gunn continued: “Sales of our colour negative and transparency films are doing very well and there has also been a recent upturn in sales of our instant films. We will continue to support photographers who appreciate the quality and flexibility of real film with a range of marketing activities including the Fujifilm Distinctions Awards, the Fujifilm Student Awards and our online resource for film users, Choose-film.com.”

For further details on the Fujifilm range of Professional film visit, www.fujifilm.co.uk/professional

Canon announced today it will release a firmware update for the EOS 5D Mark II allowing users to manually control exposure when shooting video. The new firmware will be available for download from 2 June 2009 on Canon Europe’s support web site.

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The May edition of Master Photo>Digital is now available for reading, free, on our YUDU digital edition site:

There is also a new site for MPA Affiliates and anyone interested in becoming a member of the Master Photographers Association (this is limited to full time photographers).

- DK

Much has been written in the past few days about the Canon 5D MkII’s so-called black dot problem, in which pixels to the right (as viewed) of extreme point source highlights appear as black dots. Canon has been asked for explanations; my feeling is that the explanation is already present in the way that the 5D MkII handles the necessary process of sharpening.

5D MkII files I have shot (around 500, I’m not a prolific shooter, before the test camera went back) display a far more aggressive edge sharpening policy than any other DSLR raw file I’ve seen. Combined with a very steep midtone curve – crushing the shadows a fair bit, but not unkind to highlights – this produces some of the sharpest looking images around ‘out of the box’.

But, if that visual acuity is to exist on moderate contrast contours and transitions (dark/light boundaries – the basis for all sharpening) it may be extreme on boundaries between dark midtone and small blown highlight pixels. The directional quality of the black dot problem points to a sharpening artefact, or more accurately an edge enhancement artefact – not to be confused with post-capture or JPEG process sharpening.

If so a firmware fix is possible. It may, in the process, make the 5D MkII images from raw appear a touch softer than they do right now. These ‘black dots’ are certainly not dead pixels, and don’t have much to do with the actual sensels on the CMOS. They are created after the image is read out from the silicon.

I may be wrong, but that’s my prediction – the black dots will prove to be an artefact created by a aggressive contour sharpening policy.

- DK

You can read Thom Hogan, you can not read Michael Reichmann (because he tells you to read Thom Hogan instead!) and you can muse for hours on the unexpected price bombshell which accompanied the Nikon D3X launch. Then you can watch in surprise as the camera sells.

Why? Read on.

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This article – much more like today’s personal blogs – was included in the December 1995 contents of the Photon website. It looked back on one year, since the first day I connected to Internet in December 1994. At the time, I had absolutely no idea of the value of Photon. I learned to write HTML pages in the week before Christmas and put together then first Photon ‘pilot issue’ over the holiday break. Before this, I had no dial-up account and no knowledge of WWW. By mid-1995 Photon was in the world’s top ten websites, rated as third most popular website globally by Yahoo! and receiving more hits than Microsoft or Apple websites, or The White House, from its original hosting URL of http://www.scotborders.co.uk/photon

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