GEAR UPDATE

Our round-up of the latest digital photography must-haves

01 Benq SW271 Display your Canon’s shots with uncompromising accuracy £1,067/$1,099 www.benq.co.uk

Benq’s latest photography-focussed display is all about colour accuracy, with new AQCOLOR technology that uses a combination of hardware calibration, Benq’s Palette Master Elements software and Technicolor® Color Certification to ensure the monitor meets the strict industry standard colour accuracy requirements. The display consists of a 27-inch 4K IPS panel with true 10-bit colour plus 100% SRGB and 99% Adobe RGB coverage.

02 Broncolor Litepipe P Light shaping that’s big on diffusion yet packs small £940/$1,290 www.manfrotto.co.uk/broncolor

The Lightpipe is a compact and convenient alternative to a softbox for studio or location lighting, giving a wide beam of highly diffused illumination. Based around a roll-up diffusion sheet, it can be assembled in less than a minute to form a 125x17cm modifier tube providing 360-degrees of illumination perpendicular to the light source. For a more focussed beam, half the pipe can be shrouded. The Litepipe collapses into a 60x22x21cm carry bag and is compatible with Pulso G, Unilite, Litos, Siros and MOBILED lamps.

03 Canon Powershot G1 X Mark III Canon’s most powerful Powershot yet £1,150/$1,300 www.canon.co.uk

The G1 X Mark III is no incremental upgrade. It boasts a 24MP APS-C sensor and DIGIC 7 processor combo, along with Dual Pixel AF; the largest sensor and most advanced AF ever in a Canon point-andshoot. The new body design is dust and water resistant and is fronted by a fixed 24-72mm f/2.8-5.6 stabilised zoom lens. Where the Mark II design ditched a built-in viewfinder, the Mark III gets a 2.36-million dot OLED EVF to supplement its 3-inch vari-angle touchscreen. Canon has managed to cram all this into a device measuring just 115x78x51mm and weighing a modest 400g.

04 Gitzo GHFG1 Fluid Gimbal Head Heads-up: Gitzo enters the gimbal sector £400/$TBA www.manfrotto.co.uk/gitzo

gitzo is out to wow wildlife shooters with this new gimbal head featuring fluidity control that smooths rotation and absorbs vibration during slow panning movements. But when a quick whip-pan is needed, the fluid system disengages to minimise resistance for a faster action.

05 LEE Filters Reverse ND Filters Flip your perspective on the ND grad From £97/$125 www.leefilters.com

Typical graduated neutral density filters don’t work when shooting into a sunset where the brightest point of the composition is on the horizon. But using a hard grad would darken the rest of the sky too much. A reverse ND filter solves the problem by positioning the densest point in the middle of the filter.

06 Photoshop CC 2018 Photoshop enters its 19th incarnation From £10/month/$10/month www.adobe.com/uk

new features include Color and Luminance Range Masking in Camera Raw. This lets you rapidly and non-destructively adjust a range of colours or tones in an image with no need to painstakingly mask them. It’s now possible to view Lightroom Photos from the Photoshop Start Screen, provided you’ve synced them in the cloud. Image upscaling is enhanced with new deep-learning algorithms for more detailed results, while spherical VR panoramas can be edited in a 3D wraparound workspace.

07 Zeiss Milvus 1.4/25 The Milvus range gets its eleventh entry £2,000/$2,400 www.zeiss.com.uk/camera-lenses

it’s the fourth – and widest – lens in the series with a f/1.4 aperture ideal for low light shooting. You don’t get AF, but there’s a manual ring for accurate focus adjustment. It contains a 15-element lens stack with two aspherical elements and multiple elements with anomalous partial dispersion to minimise fringing, while Zeiss’ T* coating helps banish reflections.