Affinity faces upheaval and ZR onslaught – Photo news of the week

After numerous new products recently and the IBC broadcast trade fair, the photography industry is in the doldrums for now. Perhaps not a bad thing in early autumn, one of the most attractive times for outdoor photography.

And if you're not lucky enough to have a golden October day, you might want to update your software or think about new purchases. You may notice that the online shop for the Affinity programs has been offline for a good week now. Neither Affinity Photo nor Affinity Designer are currently available for purchase. Serif, the company behind the brand, promises major innovations on 30 October. We can only speculate as to why they will have to close their store for a whole four weeks.

A good year and a half ago, Serif was acquired by the operator of the graphic design platform Canva. And even back then, our colleague Leo Becker wrote that Canva also earns its money with subscription models. This was something that previously set the Affinity products apart from Adobe: Photo and Designer were available as a one-off payment. And in this column, we also pointed out at the end of Adobe's endlessly running Elements programs that the alternatives, Affinity and DxO had better not copy this.

Many customers don't want subscriptions

It is still unclear how Affinity will turn out. However, it is clear, at least as far as Platform X is concerned, that many Serif customers do not want a subscription. In the responses from users to Serif's announcement about the ominous new features, the tenor is clear: no subscription-only model.

And Serif's reactions to X are just as clear, albeit soft: they are listening, have always stood for fairness, and so on and so forth. No appeasement text module from the marketing textbook remains unused. Again, it is not explained why the iPad version of Affinity Designer 2 is currently available for free in Apple's App Store. All in all, you will probably have to wait until October 30. "Creative freedom begins" then, according to the Affinity website. Perhaps we can still hope a little.

High demand for Nikon's ZR – or?

At the end of October, we will also see how successful Nikon's first 6K cine camera, which was developed after the acquisition of Red, will be. We have already presented the Nikon ZR, and Nikon's Japanese product page now states that there is great demand for the camera. Depending on the translation tool used, there are a "large number of pre-orders" or Nikon is "overwhelmed" by the demand. This could also be marketing.

In any case, most German distributors are still accepting pre-orders, with many promising delivery in October or November. It is not yet clear whether this is due to the large delivery quantities announced, or whether fewer of the cameras specializing in filming are being pre-ordered in Germany than in Japan. Autumn will therefore be unexpectedly exciting in the world of photography.

(nie)