This week's roundup of news stories; including Sandmarc adds pro-level magnification for the iPhone, Puget Systems' powerful Topaz Workstation for vMix, and the new Laowa 200mm f/2 AF FF.
Sandmarc's Telephoto Tetraprism Lens for iPhone is a 48mm telephoto lens that brings pro-level magnification to the iPhone’s dedicated zoom.
Sandmarc says it achieves up to 16x optical magnification (384mm) on iPhone 17 Pro models and 10x zoom (240mm) on iPhone 16 Pro models and iPhone 15 Pro Max. It mounts directly to the iPhone Tetraprism lens and integrates seamlessly with SANDMARC iPhone filters and accessories for a complete mobile creator setup.
Technical Specifications
☉ Lens: 48mm
☉ Magnification: 2x
☉ Field of view: 52°
☉ Weight: 143g / 5.0 oz
☉ Height: 57.3mm / 2.26 in
☉ Diameter: 40.5mm
☉ Inner Thread: 17mm
Price is $269.
Puget Systems was at last week's NAB New York with a newly-designed, custom, high-performance workstation optimized for broadcast and live streaming using vMix. The company says that some of its largest customers, including Microsoft and TikTok, specifically requested that it work directly with vMix to combine its expertise with vMix’s own testing and recommendations. The result is a highly-tailored system designed to thrive in the most challenging live broadcast environments.
Key specifications for the Puget Systems Topaz Workstation for vMix on display at NAB NY 2025 included:
Price starts at $6385.
Colorfront's Transkoder mastering system has become one of the first software solutions to receive the prestigious HDR Vivid Color-Grading Award. Developed by the China Ultra HD Video Industry Alliance, HDR Vivid has been widely-adopted in the Chinese market for high-quality HDR streaming and broadcasting. With this new certification, Colorfront’s Transkoder now supports PQ-encoded HEVC rendering with embedded HDR Vivid metadata, enabling frame-by-frame dynamic tone-mapping on compatible HDR Vivid displays.
Alongside this enhanced encoding capability, Colorfront has introduced a new HDR Vivid node within Transkoder, giving users the ability to preview and verify HDR Vivid color-mapping tailored to specific target displays before final delivery.
The new TLS Olympus OM lens range brings Yoshihisa Maitani’s timeless optical vision into the modern filmmaking era. Originally designed in the early 1970s, the Olympus OM lenses were built on a simple yet powerful philosophy: compact, beautifully engineered, and optically superb. They quickly gained a reputation for sharpness, natural rendering, and rich colour reproduction.
TLS is rehousing the Olympus OM lenses to professional cinema standards in a process that preserves their original optical charm while adding the durability, precision, and usability demanded on modern production sets.
With floating elements that maintain sharpness across the entire focus range and variable cams for precise, smooth focus control, the TLS rehoused Olympus OM lenses offer cinematographers the perfect balance of unique character and modern precision.
With a price of just $1799 - $1999 and a weight of only ~1.588kg / 3.5 lb (Canon EF) and accurate autofocus, the company says this legendary lens is more accessible than ever. More info here.
Dust is one of the most common issues when shooting high-resolution commercial video. Even the smallest specks are visible on dark clothing, and macro product shots can reveal every tiny particle. Estonian developer Retouch4me's Dust OFX is a DaVinci Resolve plug-in that cleans entire timelines from dust with one click.
The Dust neural network was trained from scratch on professionally retouched photos. Thousands of calculations and experiments have achieved high-end retouching quality while preserving surface textures. Unlike built-in video editor tools that require manual corrections, Dust OFX processes footage fully automatically —detecting particles, tracking them across frames, and removing them without blurring surrounding areas, with no manual touch-ups needed.
The plugin supports video up to 4K resolution and is compatible with DaVinci Resolve 18 and later on Windows and macOS. It's not cheap at $349, but given the amount of time it can potentially save, if it's right for you it could be a bargain. A free trial is available at: https://retouch4.me/dust-video
Finally, just an aside really. Anyone else noticed the subtle rebranding of the Nikon ZR recently? More than one site, including all of Nikon's European ones, now refer to it as the RED ZR. Feels like the slow start of a rebadging effort...