Technology

The largest trend in photography over the last five years or so, not counting smartphones, has been the emergence and maturity of mirrorless camera systems. These operate in a very different manner from traditional SLRs, and as such market leaders with decades embedded in the latter — namely Canon and Nikon — have resisted making the shift. That changes for Nikon today with its announcement of the Z6 and Z7, which show the company is making the change wholeheartedly.

The Z series comprises both these two cameras and a new lens mount, which in many ways is the more important news for photographers. The F mount has been around for decades and boasts some of the worldbest glass. But ultimately a more or less clean break was needed, and the Z mount manages to provide that, as well as solid back-compatibility for those who can&t bear to part with their old standby kit.

The cameras themselves, which have been rumored for ages and were known to be imminent, are both full-frame, meaning their sensor is as big as a 35mm still-film frame. Full-frame cameras are generally intended for professionals or deep-pocketed hobbyists: bodies generally cost well over $1,000 but offer improved image quality for a variety of reasons.

So itsomewhat ambitious of Nikon to aim at this elevated market, where competition is tough, standards are high and prices are higher. Old favorites like the Canon 5D vie with new challengers like Sonya9, and it seems as if slowly but surely the latter are coming out on top, due in no small part to the advantages conferred on them by their mirrorless nature.

The Z7 starts at $3,400, which puts it squarely in professional territory. The Z6, at $2,000, sacrifices resolution but offers some other advantages — aside from holding onto that $1,400. If it were me I&d go for the latter, no question.

Big and small changes

The Z7 is the new flagship, and it closely replicates the ability of the popular Nikon D850, while adding a variety of improvements. Most obvious is body size; the camera is much, much smaller and lighter than its SLR predecessor, but is still far from petite. It also improves on a few stats like burst speed and autofocus in ways that will be appreciated by pros, and a new 10-bit N-LOG video output mode should provide more flexibility in post.

Its sibling, the Z6, has a lower megapixel count (24 versus 45) but further improves burst speed and may in fact prove superior in terms of video performance.

Both make the switch to an electronic viewfinder, or EVF, and apparently Nikon was very particular about this component. The resolution of the OLED eyepiece is 1280×960, which sounds low compared with phone and VR displays, but should be fine — and really, motion and color are more important. The rear LCD is also OLED, as is a little up-facing status display on the top plate.

Both also have in-body stabilization, which means lenses can be lighter and cheaper. The stabilization will work with older lenses too (more on this in a moment) and in cases where a long lens has its own stabilization system, the camera will defer to that at least on some axes.

I haven&t had a chance to play with these in person but I expect to soon; in the meantime, as always, DPReview has a solid set of first impressions.

Z-mount into the future

For many, the biggest change will be the switch to the new Z-mount system. There will be a series of Z lenses, and bonny lenses they will be, with the new dimensions allowing improved optics across the board. Everyone is hot about a F/0.95 Noct lens Nikon has been teasing for 2019. But with a hundred million F-mount lenses out there, backwards compatibility is a must.

For them there is the FTZ adapter, which fits between the Z and the old lens, bridging the old technology and the new. If the lens is relatively new and supports automatic aperture and focus, those will be available. And, in fact, these lenses will benefit from the new autofocus system and may perform better than they did originally, if not identically — slight changes will no doubt emerge from the addition of the new optics.

Older lenses, such as classics with manual focus and aperture, will still fit the adapter but can&t be magically endowed with automatic features.

The adapter is not inconsiderable in size — more like a pancake lens than a filter. So your favorite lightweight walk-around setup may be impacted negatively. But overall it seems like it should do nicely for most.

Nikon has made its play, and the Z series looks like a natural jump for thousands of photographers who have stuck with the brand for years out of loyalty and investment. It doesn&t take much away, it adds quite a bit and in a few years it will probably be a no-brainer rather than a &well, maybe.&

I wrote the law that allows sites to be unfettered free speech marketplaces. I wrote that same law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, to provide vital protections to sites that didn&t want to host the most unsavory forms of expression. The goal was to protect the unique ability of the internet to be the proverbial marketplace of ideas while ensuring that mainstream sites could reflect the ethics of society as a whole.

In general, this has been a success — with one glaring exception. I never expected that internet CEOs would fail to understand one simple principle: that an individual endorsing (or denying) the extermination of millions of people, or attacking the victims of horrific crimes or the parents of murdered children, is far more indecent than an individual posting pornography.

If you want to be the CEO of an internet titan where schools communicate with students, artists with their fans or elected officials with their constituents, you need to limit content like pornography — and they all do. But for some reason, these CEOs think itentirely appropriate to allow these other forms of indecency to live on their platforms. Their ineptitude is threatening the very legal foundation of social media.

Social media cannot exist without the legal protections of Section 230. That protection is not constitutional, itstatutory. Failure by the companies to properly understand the premise of the law is the beginning of the end of the protections it provides. I say this because their failures are making it increasingly difficult for me to protect Section 230 in Congress. Members across the spectrum, including far-right House and Senate leaders, are agitating for government regulation of internet platforms. Even if government doesn&t take the dangerous step of regulating speech, just eliminating the 230 protections is enough to have a dramatic, chilling effect on expression across the internet.

Were Twitter to lose the protections I wrote into law,within 24 hoursits potential liabilities would be many multiples of its assets and its stock would be worthless. The same for Facebook and any other social media site. Boards of directors should have taken action long before now against CEOs who refuse to recognize this threat to their business.

Ittelling that Reddit, of all the social media sites, has been on the forefront of striking a balance — telling because they&re the only site owned by a traditional pre-internet corporation. This balance is not the one I would have chosen — and certainly there have been missteps and failures — but an average user of Reddit won&t encounter the extremes of obscenity and indecency that it allows in darker corners of the site. And even they have defined certain speech as too indecent to be permitted on their platform.

There are real consequences to social media hosting radically indecent speech, and those consequences are looming. They are threatening to undo more than 20 years of internet law and jurisprudence that has protected speech and expression as never before. The forces of government regulation and control never sleep. Unfortunately, the internet CEOs have been asleep at the wheel.

As fields of research, machine learning and artificial intelligence both date back to the 50s. More than half a century later, the disciplines have graduated from the theoretical to practical, real world applications. We&ll have some of the top minds in both categories to discuss the latest advances and future of AI and ML on stage and Disrupt San Francisco in early September.

For the first time, Disrupt SF will be held in San FranciscoMoscone Center. Ita huge space, which meant we could dramatically increase the amount of programming offered to attendees. And we did. Herethe agenda. Tickets are still available even though the show is less than two weeks away. Grab one here.

The show features the themes currently facing the technology world including artificial intelligence and machine learning. Some of the top minds in AI and ML are speaking on several stages and some are taking audience questions. We&re thrilled to be joined by Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, former president of Google China and current CEO of Sinovation Ventures, Colin Angle, co-founder and CEO of iRobots, Claire Delaunay, Nvidia VP of Engineering, and among others, Dario Gil, IBM VP of AI.

Dr. Kai-Fu Lee is the CEO and chairman of Sinovation, a venture firm based in the U.S. and China, and he has emerged as one of the worldtop prognosticators on artificial intelligence and how the technology will disrupt just about everything. Dr. Lee wrote in The New York Times last year that AI is &poised to bring about a wide-scale decimation of jobs — mostly lower-paying jobs, but some higher-paying ones, too.& Dr. Lee will also be on our Q-A stage (after his interview on the Main Stage) to take questions from attendees.

Colin Angle co-founded iRobot with fellow MIT grads Rod Brooks and Helen Greiner in 1990. Early on, the company provided robots for military applications, and then in 2002, introduced the consumer-focused Roomba. Angle has plenty to talk about. As the CEO and Chairman of iRobot, he led the company through the sale of its military branch in 2016 so the company can focus on robots in homes. If thereanyone that knows how to both work with the military and manage consumers& expectations with household robots, itColin Angle and we&re excited to have him speaking at the event where he will also take questions from the audience on the Q-A stage.

Claire Delaunay is vice president of engineering at Nvidia, where she is responsible for the Isaac robotics initiative and leads a team to bring Isaac to market for roboticists and developers around the world. Prior to joining Nvidia, Delaunay was the director of engineering at Uber, after it acquired Otto, the startup she co-founded. She was also the robotics program lead at Google and founded two companies, Botiful and Robotics Valley. Delaunay will also be on our Q-A stage (after his interview on the Main Stage) to take questions from attendees.

Dario Gil, the head of IBM AI research efforts and quantum computing program, is coming to Disrupt Sf to talk about the current state of quantum computing. We may even see a demo or two of whatpossible today and use that to separate hype from reality. Among the large tech firms, IBM — and specifically the IBM Q lab — has long been at the forefront of the quantum revolution. Last year, the company showed off its 50-qubit quantum computer and you can already start building software for it using the companydeveloper kit.

Sam Liang is the CEO/Co-Founder of AISense Inc, based in Silicon Valley. Funded by Horizons Ventures (DeepMind, Waze, Zoom, Facebook), Tim Draper, David Cheriton of Stanford (first investor in Google), etc. AISense has created Ambient Voice Intelligence technologies with deep learning that understands human-to-human conversations. Its Otter.ai product digitizes all voice meetings and video conferences, makes every conversation searchable and also provides speech analytics and insights. Otter.ai is the exclusive provider of automatic meeting transcription for Zoom Video Communications.

Laura Major is the Vice President of Engineering at CyPhy Works, where she leads R-D, product design and development and manages the multi-disciplinary engineering team. Prior to joining CyPhy Works, she worked at Draper Laboratory as a division lead and developed the first human-centered engineering capability and expanded it to included machine intelligence and AI. Laura also grew multiple programs and engineering teams to contribute to the development and expansion of ATAK, which is now in wide use across the military.

Dr. Jason Mars founded and runs Clinc to try to close the gap in conversational AI by emulating human intelligence to interpret unstructured, unconstrained speech. AI has the potential to change everything, but there is a fundamental disconnect between what AI is capable of and how we interface with it. Clinc is currently targeting the financial market, letting users converse with their bank account using natural language without any pre-defined templates or hierarchical voice menus. At Disrupt SF, Mars is set to debut other ways that Clincconversational AI can be applied. Without ruining the surprise, let me just say that this is going to be a demo you won&t want to miss. After the demo, he will take questions on the Q-A stage.

Chad Rigetti, the namesake founder of Rigetti Computing, will join us at Disrupt SF 2018 to explain Rigettiapproach to quantum computing. Ittwo-fold: on one front, the company is working on the design and fabrication of its own quantum chips; on the other, the company is opening up access to its early quantum computers for researchers and developers by way of its cloud computing platform, Forest. Rigetti Computing has raised nearly $70 million to date according to Crunchbase, with investment from some of the biggest names around. Meanwhile, labs around the country are already using Forest to explore the possibilities ahead.

Kyle Vogt co-founded and eventually sold Cruise Automation to General Motors in 2016. He stuck around after the sale and still leads the company today. Since selling the company to GM, Cruise has scaled rapidly and seemed to maintain a scrappy startup feel though now a division of a massive corporation. The company had 30 self-driving test cars on the road in 2016 and later rolled out a high-definition mapping system. In 2017 the company started running an autonomous ride-hailing service for its employees in San Francisco, later announcing its self-driving cars would hit New York City. Recently SoftBankVision Fund invested $2.25 billion in GM Cruise Holdings LLC and when the deal closes, GM will invest an additional $1.1 billion. The investments are expected to inject enough capital into Cruise for the unit to reach commercialization at scale beginning in 2019.