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PMA
2004 Report SHOW OVERVIEW: WHAT IT'S REALLY LIKE skip to what's new PMA, the Photo Marketing Association's annual trade show, was held in Las Vegas in February 2004. The PMA show is the US photo industry's largest. The show is attended by camera store employees and owners as well as the press, and the exhibitors are the photo companies. It is closed to professional photographers and closed to the public. Many new things are introduced at PMA. The only bigger show is Photokina, held in Germany every other year. The most impressive thing I saw was a GIGA-pixel-plus image of Bryce Canyon made by Max Lyons shown at the Océ printer exhibit. Max wrote special software to stitch together 192 separate 6MP images from his old Canon D60 camera to make a print 10 feet or so on a side at 300DPI. I've never seen anything like it in all my decades of photography; not even an Ansel Adams mural made from 8 x 10" original has this level of detail. Very little of the show is the equipment photographers find interesting. Most of the show are exhibitors trying to get camera stores to sell their products by convincing camera stores that there is big money to be made. Most money in camera stores is made on film and batteries and frames and accessories. Thus most of the show are foreign companies trying to hawk cases and bags and photo frames and photo mug making machines and minilab systems. Of course every camera company under the sun is there as well as the companies photographers find interesting. Also I was amused that there were a load of companies all seeming to think that they had just discovered some unique twist to online photo sharing. Gimme a break; you've been able to do that at Yahoo! since the 1990s. Heck, before I learned to do this website correctly KenRockwell.com used to link to an online gallery at Yahoo! Ditto for online photo printing, which is where you can order real photo prints mailed to you if you post or email digital pictures to a site. Folks like Shutterfly and Yahoo have been doing this for years, and there are lots of others today who are doing the same thing. Another underwhelming aspect were all the sellers of magic image correction software. I lost count of how many excited vendors showed me their books of before and after prints proving how their magic software corrected every known photo vice. Nope, all they all did was lighten dark images by examining a histogram. Of course many vendors had interesting Photoshop plug-ins, that's another story. Some software vendors, like Roxio, didn't bother to exhibit because these old-fashioned trade shows don't make sense in the Internet age. NEW EQUIPMENT back to top Canon
Fuji Minolta Dimage A2 point-and-shoot: was just a wooden model and a press release, not a real camera. Roughly same as the other 8MP p/s cameras. I'd forget this class of camera and go straight to a real DSLR today, more here. It does have mechanical vibration reduction, a slick feature for a point-and-shoot. Maxxum 7 DSLR (Dynax 7 outside of USA): Again it was just a wooden model and a press release, not a real camera. It will have a standard sized (for digital SLRs) 6MP CCD and a novel mechanical vibration reduction system. Don't hold your breath, maybe we'll see it in summer. Nikon
HP Kodak Leica Sigma Unique 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6 zoom covers 35mm film and digital SLRs. It covers the full 35mm film frame making it the world's widest rectilinear lens for 35mm SLRs, displacing the 13mm Nikkor that has been special-order only since the 1970s. I do want to review one of them in depth; the one I tried seemed pretty good for the insane zoom range it offers. Sony Tokina: |