Is a $10,000 Leica M9 setup worth it? —

Marco Arment rented Leica's well-loved but expensive M9 digital camera, and a similarly top-shelf lens, to see what the fuss is about. The bottom line: great glass, but a frustrating and surprisingly low-end shooting experience. I wonder if Sony's new full-frame compact is going to eat their lunch. — Rob •

Canon's EOS M is finally upon us. $800 will get you the company's first mirrorless, interchangeable-lens camera, with a 22mm prime and a sales pitch centered firmly around its video capabilities.

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Sony's RX100 gets glowing write-up —

Sony's RX100 is no larger than Canon's popular S100, but has a far larger image sensor. What this means is simple: better photos with greater depth of field and superior low-light performance. David Pogue is among the first to review it , and finds himself impressed by a point-and-shoot camera that approaches DSLR image quality: "If you care at all about your photography, you’ll thank Sony for giving the camera industry a good hard shove into the future."

The caveat, of course, is that you will pay $650 for it. Apart from the minimalist looks and 1" Exmor CMOS sensor, that gets you 20.2 megapixels, an F1.8 Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T* lens, 3.6x zoom, RAW image capture, and full HD 1080 video at 60p video with manual control (alas, no 24p).

Sony DSC-RX100 [Amazon referrer link] — Rob •

With the minimally-designed Cyber-shot RX100, Sony puts a large sensor in a pocket camera—and with it, the promise of much higher-quality photographs. It comes with a 28-100mm-equivalent F1.8-4.9 image-stabilized 3x-zoom lens, and that 20MP Exmor CMOS sensor—about a third the size of APS-C—captures raw. On the back, a 3" LCD display and pop-up flash. The catch: it's $650. Imaging Resource has an exhaustive review.

If you've got a major-brand camera with a built-in GPS, don't plan on taking any geotagged photos in China. Chinese law prohibits mapmaking without a license, and most of the large camera manufacturers have complied with this regulation by quietly slipping a censorship function into the GPS -- when you take a picture, the camera checks to see if it's presently in China, and if it is, it throws away its GPS data, rather than embedding it in the photo's metadata. On Ogle Earth, Stefan Geens looks at how several different manufacturers handle this weirdness -- how they phrase it in their manuals, and what their cameras do when they run up against this limitation. It's a fascinating look at the interface between consumer electronics, user interface, and the edicts of totalitarian regimes. In some Nikon cameras, for example, the GPS does work, but all its measurements are shifted about 500m to the west (!).

Why does all this matter? Wherever local laws prohibit the sale or use of a personal electronics device able to perform a certain function, manufacturers have traditionally chosen not to sell the offending device in that particular jurisdiction, or — if the market is tempting enough — to sell a crippled model made especially for that jurisdiction.

For example, Nokia chose not to sell the N95 phone in Egypt when the sale of GPS-enabled devices there was illegal before 2009, whereas Apple opted to make and sell a special GPS-less iPhone 3G for that market. Early models of the Chinese iPhone 3GS lacked wifi, while the Chinese iPhone 4/4S has firmware restrictions on its Google Maps app.

The risk to consumers in freer countries is that personal electronics brands might be tempted to simplify their manufacturing processes by building just one device for the global market, catering to the lowest common denominator of freedom — especially if the more restrictive legal jurisdictions contain some of the most attractive markets, such as mainland China.

Still, in the absence of more information from Panasonic, Leica, FujiFilm, Nikon and Samsung, I can’t decisively say whether this is the business logic behind their decision to cripple the GPS in their cameras. And yet uncrippled GPS cameras from Sony and others are freely available for sale in China, for example on Taobao, China’s eBay...

Why do Panasonic, Leica, FujiFilm, Samsung and Nikon censor their GPS cameras? (Thanks, Jeffrey!)

[Video Link]

Canadian yarn-lover and privacy-lover Howie Woo has developed an ingenious system for thwarting surveillance cameras that use face recognition technology. His solution involves crochet and LOLs. Here are more photos (via the Boing Boing Flickr Pool). More about Howie's playful creations here.

After all the fuss about Lytro's 'focus in post' camera—and the bathos of its low-quality results—Canon's EOS 5D Mark III is something of an antidote. It has a 22.3 megapixel full-frame sensor, 61-point autofocus (like the 1D), 6fps burst shooting and an ISO range of 100 to 25,600. Dual memory card slots (Compact Flash and SD) and a 3.2" 1-megapixel LCD screen are standard-issue; in-camera HDR, a faster CPU and 100 percent viewfinder coverage are new.

1080p video at 24, 25 and 30 fps is also to be expected, but DSLR filmmakers should like the headphone jack, audio monitoring and the image processor's anti-moire and anti-artifact capabilities. The Mark III lacks the 60D's flip-up LCD display, however, a feature some forum posters hoped for. Several new accessories were announced alongside the Mark III, including two new flash units, a battery grip, a wireless file transfer unit and a GPS receiver.

As antidotes go, this one will not be covered by your insurance: it's $3,499 for the body alone, significantly pricier than the Mark II. The price tag hits four grand when bundled with a 24-105mm kit lens.

Canon EOS 5D Mark III [Amazon]

Lytro light-field camera reviewed —

At The Verge, David Piece reviews Lytro, the camera that allows photos to be refocused after taking a shot. Explained in-depth at The Economist by Glenn Fleishman, it gathers data for all focal lengths with each snapshot. But as Pierce learned, there are compromises in store. — Rob •

Photojojo's iPhone Rangefinder case clips onto your iPhone, making it look like an iPhone inside a case that looks like a bit like a rangefinder. It's compatible with Photojojo's magnetic fisheye, wide-angle/macro and tele lenses: you can get it with a full set for $99. [via This Isn't Happiness]

Kodak bankrupt —

The company that invented the hand-held camera filed for bankruptcy protection. [Reuters] — Rob •

Phillip Stearns created Year of the Glitch, a gallery of electronic artwork resulting from the shortcomings of digital cameras. There'll be a new image added each day until 2013, at which point the world collapses to a single glowing, phosphorescent point inside the great cathode ray tube of reality. Pictured above is something weird that came out of an Olympus C-840L. [Via Photojojo]