Month: July 2020

Seagate Technology has started shipping its hard disk drives featuring a 18TB capacity to select customers, and revealed that HDDs will be more broadly available later this year. But while 18TB drives significantly increase storage capacities of modern datacenters, Seagate has a more important launch set for the next few months, as it also intends to start commercial shipments of its drives based on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). 

The importance of HAMR — a technology that has been explored for 66 years now — is fundamental as it is expected to enable hard with capacities of up to 80 TB in the coming years.

“We began shipping 18TB drives as part of our system solution in the March quarter, with shipments to select cloud customers and channel partners starting in the June quarter,” said Dave Mosley, CEO of Seagate. “We expect to begin ramping 18-terabyte drives within the calendar year, which aligns well with market readiness.”

HAMR incoming

As expected, Seagate’s first HAMR-based HDDs will feature a 20TB capacity using heat-assisted conventional magnetic recording without any ‘shingling’ and therefore these drives will offer predictable write performance. 

“We remain on track to begin shipping our first commercially available HAMR drives in late 2020 on 20TB capacities. HAMR technology will be the industry’s path to achieving drive capacities of 30, 40, 50 terabytes and even higher. We plan to offer 20TB HAMR drives to customers on a limited basis and is part of our system solution to collect production and field data.” 

It is noteworthy that Seagate has been shipping 16TB HAMR drives to select customers for a while and to that end it already has quite some information how these HDDs behave in tightly-packed datacenters. As it turns out, the company wants to gather some more data about performance of the technology.

The Canon EOS R5 is about to put professional wildlife photographers out of business. That’s our verdict, after extensively testing the Animal AF function on the new camera, which is nothing short of witchcraft. 

Much has already been said about the Canon EOS R5, and we’ll be saying plenty more in our full review (which we’re currently putting the finishing touches on). However, something that simply can’t be said enough is just how awesome the new animal autofocus is. 

We were expecting to be impressed, but we weren’t prepared to be gobsmacked. The Animal AF is so good, and so accurate, that it is actually unfair. Wildlife photographers have spent years wrestling with twitchy autofocus, learning how to perfect their timing, sucking their teeth at all the shots that were focused on the feet or the tail or the wing instead of the eyes.

With thee Canon EOS R5, you don’t need any of that. It is literally a cheat code for wildlife photography.

We’re not exaggerating. Just select ‘Subject: Animals’ in the AF menu and set continuous autofocus, then just point your camera at an animal and the R5 will find it. No need to move your focus points or even touch the joystick – just aim in the direction of the creature and the camera does the rest for you. 

It automatically finds the face and eyes, and it does so fast. Faster than you could possibly do it yourself. And it reacts quicker, too, when animals make their herky-jerky movements that you didn’t anticipate and couldn’t put your focus points in the right place for – the R5 does it without hesitation. 

Canon only certifies its Animal AF for dogs, cats and birds (including birds in flight – and yes, it does work and yes, it’s equally amazing), but we found that it works with just about any species. Gorillas? Check. Gibbons? Check. Lions? Check. Turtles, iguanas, fish, lemurs, seals? Check, check, check, check and check. 

The whole 4K and 8K overheating thing is a very public sore point for the Canon EOS R5, and we’ll give you our verdict on that in our full review. However, if you were expecting a similar kind of sting in the tail for the Animal AF… there isn’t one. It simply works, and it’s simply awesome. 

And, just like that, Sony is no longer the king of autofocus – Canon now sits proudly on the AF throne, thanks to the R5. 

Last year Sony sold the most full-frame mirrorless cameras in Japan, and while Canon and Nikon attempt to play catch up, today Sony is announcing its latest high-end mirrorless cam – the A7SIII – which looks like it’s about to crush the competition.

Now I fully admit that using “crush” this way is a bit hyperbolic, and because the camera won’t be available in stores until sometime in September, things could change between now and then. But if you look at the A7SIII’s specs and new features, Sony’s latest full-frame mirrorless feels like a shot across the bow of every other high-end camera maker.

The A7SIII starts with a 12-MP backside-illuminated sensor that Sony says was designed to maximise low-light performance and deliver super-fast sensor readout times, which helps reduce the effect of things like rolling shutter. Then Sony paired that 12-MP sensor with its new Bionz XR image processor which the company claims is eight times more powerful than its previous Bionz chip while offering even faster face and eye detection, better colour reproduction, and support for significantly higher data speeds, both when writing to internal memory cards or when sent out over HDMI (via a full-size HDMI Type-A port) or wifi.

The good stuff doesn’t stop there though because the A7SIII has a new 9.44 million-dot OLED electronic viewfinder that boasts almost twice the resolution of its closest competitors like the 5.76 million dot OLED EVF used in the Panasonic S1. Alternatively, for those who prefer framing up shots using a camera’s rear display, the A7SIII also comes with a fully articulating rear touchscreen (another first for any of Sony’s full-frame A-series cams) that can be flipped around a full 180 degrees so you can easily compose shots from in front of the cam. That said, because of the position of the A7SIII’s HDMI port, if you do have an external monitor or recorder attached, you might have to deal with cables partially getting in the way of that display.

As for storage, Sony is even including two new CF Express card readers that support both standard SD cards and new CF Express Type-A cards, with the A7SIII being the first camera designed to take advantage of the new cards. One immediate advantage of the new card reader is that when combined with its speedier image processor, Sony says the A7SIII now features an image buffer of up to 1,000 shots, even when the camera is shooting full out at 10 FPS in RAW + JPEG mode.

This means users coming from older cameras won’t need to buy a new set of cards for storage right away, though if you do want to take advantage of the A7SIII’s advanced video recording formats, you will need to upgrade at some point. Though with CFexpress Type A cards slated to cost $200 (£154) for an 80GB card or $400 (£309) for a 160GB card (UK pricing is TBA), you might need to save up a bit before switching.

And with the A7S line historically being a major go to camera for video, Sony also included support for 4K video recording using the camera’s full pixel readout at up to 120 fps, or up to 240 fps at 1080p. The A7SIII also supports 10-bit 4:2:2 colour, four-channel audio recording, and thanks to improvements in recording speeds and heat dissipation, the A7SIII no longer has a max 30-minute recording time either.

Sony even addressed one of the longest-running gripes about Sony cameras in general by completely redesigning the A7SIII’s menu system so that it’s better organised, works with touch input, and easier to see multiple layers of settings without needing to constantly dig three or four levels deep. And like other A-series cameras, the A7SIII also features in-body image stabilisation (up to 5.5 stops) and compatibility with Sony’s huge lineup of E-mount lenses.

However, unlike the new Canon EOS R5, the A7SIII does not come with support for 8K video recording, which was an intentional choice made by Sony as the company wanted to focus strictly on making the best possible 4K video camera it could. It’s an interesting move by Sony, because while 8K video is sure to become a more important feature in the future, considering the workflows of most filmmakers today, I think Sony made a prudent decision to really concentrate its efforts on 4K.

The Sony A7SIII is expected to go on sale sometime in September for £3,800 (body only). Compared to other full-frame mirrorless competitors, the A7SIII costs £400 less than Canon’s EOS R5 and £200 more than Panasonic’s S1H, but about £1,100 more than a Nikon Z7.

The division responsible for Konami’s famed pachinko machines is diving into a new market: PC gaming. Japanese outlet PC Watch (via Tom’s Hardware) reports that the company has three desktop models currently available to preorder, with shipping due to commence this September.

The Arespear product line is handled by Konami Amusements, which also handles arcade systems and the company’s esports interests. The models range from 184,000 yen (roughly $1,750 in the US) through to 338,800 yen ($3,205) depending on the specs.

And what are they? The Arespear C300 is the low cost model, with an i5-9400F processor, a GTX 1650, 8GB of DDR4-2666 memory and a 512GB SSD. The Arespear C700 and C700+ have much better specs: a watercooled i7-9700, an RTX 2070 Super and 16GB DDR4-2666 memory. These models house the same 512GB M.2 PCIe SSD as the C300, but also come with a 1TB hard drive.

The difference between the C700 and C700+ is mostly cosmetic: you’re getting RGB lighting and a windowed case for the extra 22,000 yen (around $210). All models have a discrete sound card in the form of the Asus Xonar AE.

It’s an interesting and unexpected move for Konami, for not an illogical one: as Wes reported back in 2017, PC gaming is on the up in Japan. Pre-orders are open, but it’s unclear whether they’ll ship outside of Japan.