The Legion Slim 7i has a 71 WHr battery, which could last up to 7.75 hours and allows rapid charging. To keep the system even chiller, Lenovo made the air intake system 31 percent larger. That means 115 percent more airflow goes to the CPU and GPU compared to previous versions, and there are more exhaust fan blades.

The Legion Slim 7i packs a 10th Gen Intel Core i9 HK-series mobile processor. It comes with up to 2TB of SSD storage, up to 32GB of memory and multiple 15.6-inch screen options. You can choose a 4K display with a 60Hz refresh rate and 600 nits of brightness (ideal for streamers), or a full HD display with a 144Hz refresh rate (better suited for eSports). All of the displays support Dolby Vision, and the Slim 7i has Dolby Atmos immersive sound.

In addition to the Corsair-made RGB lighting on the new TrueStrike keyboard, you’ll notice a fingerprint reader built into the power button and a privacy shutter on the webcam. The laptop is available in slate gray aluminum and starts at $1,329. It should be available this October.

The 24.6-megapixel camera has a 35mm full-frame Bayer sensor, and it weighs just 370g (less than a pound), without the battery and memory card. That’s lighter than full-frame cameras like the Panasonic S1 (1,021 grams with the battery and card), Sony A7 (650 grams) and Canon EOS RP (485 grams). Sigma is calling the fp a “pocketable full-frame” camera, and at 112.6 x 69.9 x 45.3 mm (or 4.4 x 2.75 x 1.8 inches), it will likely fit in the palm of your hand.

Sigma hasn’t announced when the Sigma fp will be released or how much it will cost, but the company’s other mirrorless cameras range from $800 to $1,200. It’s too soon to predict how successful the camera will be. If nothing else, it’s certainly ambitious.

Thanks to the new processor, the EOS RP has a very decent eye- and face-tracking system (Canon calls it pupil detection) for a budget full-frame camera. It now works in continuous mode, rather than just single-point autofocus as before. Provided I stayed pretty close to my (human) subjects, I found it locked on to their eyes and face very well. And if their eyes disappeared from view, it picked right back up again when they turned around. So Canon’s updated AI system looks very promising.

The only problem is that the RP slows to a lethargic 2.5 fps in pupil-detection mode, with a blackout between shots that makes it hard to follow fast-moving subjects. Still, for simple photo shoots or weddings, where the subject isn’t flying around, I found it tracked them and gave me a very good hit rate of in-focus shots.

I said that the EOS RP would make a good street-photography or vacation camera because of its size, but there’s a large issue with that. If you want to shoot with a silent shutter, as many street photographers do, it only works in Canon’s “scene” mode. That means you have little manual control over the setting, making it essentially useless for the unusual lighting situations that happen all the time on the streets. I can’t figure out for the life of me why Canon did this, and I really hope they rectify it with a firmware update.

Video

There’s a lot to dislike about video on the Canon EOS RP. Yes, it does 4K, but like the EOS R, only with a 1.7x APS-C sensor crop, which limits the low-light benefits and shallow depth of field of that big sensor. Worse still, the Dual Pixel autofocus system only works at 1080p, so you’re limited to the much slower, more erratic contrast-detect system for 4K.

But wait, there are more (bad) things. At 1080p, I could shoot at 30 fps and up to 60 fps, but not 24 fps — the most commonly used video speed. Meanwhile, at 4K, you can shoot at 24 fps but not 30 fps. That makes it impossible to mix and match 4K and 1080p, something that I do all the time. The problem doesn’t exist in Europe’s PAL land, as 25 fps is available in both 4K and 1080p, so switching the camera’s frequency is a possible workaround in North America. Still, this makes absolutely no sense — why, Canon, why?

With the flip-around articulating display, the Canon would make a good vlogging camera. However, it has terrible rolling shutter that, combined with the lack of in-body stabilization, makes handheld video too shaky. Finally, you can only shoot video internally and externally at 8-bit, not 10-bit, and the camera has a pretty poor dynamic range in the first place. That limited my color-correction options when editing later.

With all those issues, I can’t recommend the EOS RP for video. Canon’s EOS R is a better option, though it’s not ideal either. For around the same budget, I’d recommend Fujifilm’s X-T3, which offers phase-detect autofocus, 10-bit internal video and more. If you want full-frame and are willing to spend more, get Nikon’s Z6.

Image quality

I’ve always liked how Canon’s cameras reproduce colors, thanks to the excellent color science. The EOS RP continued in that vein, producing pleasing skin tones and colors, especially in JPEG mode. However, the dynamic range isn’t the greatest at lower ISOs, so when I shot in RAW mode and tried to push the shadows (make them brighter), I got a lot more noise than I expected.

In a paper in the journal Smart Materials and Structures, the research team explains how it has radically redesigned the airplane wing. Their new structure is a lightweight lattice framework, made of thousands of repeating, tiny triangles of matchstick-like struts, covered in a thin polymer layer. Because this “metamaterial” is mostly comprised of empty space, it is extremely lightweight — less than one-thousandth the density of rubber. And, the carefully positioned struts allow the wing to change shape automatically in response to changes in aerodynamic loading conditions. Both factors could make aircraft more energy efficient.

This isn’t an entirely new concept. It was presented a few years ago, but now, the researchers have developed a way to manufacture the individual parts for the wing using injection molding. They’ve brought the time required to produce each part — a hollow cube with tiny struts along each edge — down from several minutes to just 17 seconds. While the meter-long model they created was hand assembled, the process was designed to be repetitive, so that in the future, small, autonomous robots will be able to assemble the wings.

The potential for a light-weight, shape-shifting wing raises questions about the ideal aircraft shape. With this technology, we might be able to break away from the “tube with wings” design and utilize a more efficient configuration — possibly an integrated body and wing structure. If the idea of watching an airplane wing change shape as you cruise at 30,000 feet alarms you, don’t worry yet. This is a long way from commercial airline-ready. In the meantime, it also has the potential to redesign other structures, like the wing-like blades of wind turbines.