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Home again and exactly 98.8 miles down the road
from PMA 2001. If the Photo Marketing Association convention
ever comes to your neighborhood, by all means go! My last PMA
was in Chicago many years ago and how it's grown! At least
10,000 cameras, as many people, and twice the vehicles in the
parking lot made the Orlando Convention Center a wonderful
madhouse.
As usual, the widest and longest lenses were on
show, as were the biggest and most expensive camera, and every
one of next year's gadgets. But the most predominant word
displayed was DIGITAL!
From Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China came the
latest offerings to the digital camera world - my favorite was
the tiny Focus (about $40 US if it ever makes it to these
shores) with 2mb of DRAM memory and weighing about five ounces
without batteries. Slightly bigger than a Zippo lighter.
Adobe Photoshop Elements
Adobe announced its replacement for Photoshop LE and for all
practical purposes, PhotoDeluxe, and demonstrated Photoshop
Elements, a $99 gee-whiz application that should give even the
most timid of digital photographers heart palpitations.
Photoshop Elements lacks CMYK color space and
some of the more sophisticated web editing features (slices,
rollover) of Photoshop 6.0 but at first glance, it's equal to
its big brother and has a whole bunch of new features. Adobe has
abandoned the old cutesy graphical interface of PhotoDeluxe but
made Elements more user-friendly with the addition of graphics.
For instance, booting up presents a Quick Start
screen provides one-click navigation to any function (open, new,
copy, acquire) with clear explanatory windows. These same
windows are featured in the Hints palette, a sort of interactive
help file that makes Tool Tips seems primitive. Combinations of
effective techniques are explained and clickable in the Recipes
palette.
Photoshop's filter menu has been transformed in
Elements into a browser that shows a representative view of each
filter effect. Pick the one you want, drag its icon onto your
image and voila!
My favorite feature during Product Manager Mark
Dahm's demonstration is Photomerge, which automatically resizes,
skews and blends portions of multiple images into seamless
panoramas. This crafty feature is worth the price alone.
Much more to come in a review in Photoshop User.
Electronic Film a reality - finally!
Emerging from the vaporous mists of rumor, Silicon Film
Technologies demonstrated its Electronic Film System for the
first time. (e)film is a 35mm-like cartridge with a protruding
CMOS chip that adapts into conventional 35mm film cartridges.
Currently developed for a select number of Nikon and Canon SLRs,
the 1.3mp insert has a 64mb memory with each raw images
requiring 2.6mb. Yep, that figures out to 24 exposures (per
roll).
Part of the $699 package is the (e)port carrier
which protects the cartridges and directly uploads images to a
desktop computer. It also interfaces via a Type 2 PC Card port
to laptops . A third part is the (e)port carrier which allows
downloading the cartridge images to CompactFlash card without
being tethered to a computer.
The demo was quite impressive under controlled
studio shooting conditions. It was great to see this
long-rumored product finally appear. Because the CMOS chip is
smaller than a conventional 35mm frame, the effective focal
length of lenses is multiplied by approximately 1.5.
The Big Guns
Mobs surrounded the booths where Canon exhibited its new EOS-D30
digital SLR. Nikon was also mobbed and while I was told its new
D1X (5.75mp) was being shown but I was tired and footsore, not
feeling like fighting my way through the crowd. Pentax was
showing a pre-product 6mp SLR. Including the Fuji S1-Pro, the
slate of digital interchangeable lens SLR's is filling up. All
of these cameras share an image size/focal length factor,
meaning the hot lenses right now are the super expensive
ultra-wides (in the 14-15mm area).
One of the neatest parts of PMA is that every
manufacturer brings its full array of products. So long, fast
lenses affordable only by heads of state, were available to peer
through, focus and compose.
The Big Guns (Kodak, Canon, Fuji, Nikon) has monster pavilions.
Kodak is rumored to have spent a cool million on its PMA site.
Kodak's pavilion squatted right in the center of the PMA trade
show floor. A startling measure of the sheer size of the trade
show was when the giant Kodak logo seemed to start vanishing
over the horizon.
Grandson of MrSID
LizardTech gave a sneak preview of MrSID Generation 3 which will
feature lossless compression incoding at ratios of up to 7:1.
Most of the past emphasis on MrSID seems to have been on
compression for Internet and wireless transmission, giving The
Altamira Group a big publicity lead for lossless compression for
printing. I was promised a review copy of MrSID3 when it's ready
and it'll be interesting to see how it matches up with GF.
A Closer Look
Many new prosumer digital cameras were offered. Sony produced a
new line of Mavicas. Kyrocea showed a 3.3mp camera that could be
a winner if it matches the hyperbole of its press release.
Minolta introduced a new series which includes a pair of
SLR-likes of the school of Olympus E10. The Dimage 7 has a 5.5mp
CCD while the Dimage 5 offers a 3.4mp sensor. These
pre-production units, when closed up, resemble the Fujifilm 4900
greatly.
More fascinating was the sea of smaller vendors,
offering their products in highly specialized areas. One man
gave me a sample of his company's odorless hypo, a great idea 10
years too late for this darkroom fugitive. The Hoodman brothers
are coming out with Hoodskins, special optically coated
protective membranes for LCDs. I got to chat with the designer
and manufacturer of Pedco Ultrapods, the nifty tabletop tripods
that can Velcro onto a tree or streetlight. I have mine for
years.
In this pool of temptation, I stood strong. My
only purchase was a $30 Mini-Slave Wide strobe, a bare bulb
light to use with my Nikon CP990 - something I've been search
for years. Even though the girl at the Nikon CoolPix desk
offered me a good deal, I resisted the urge to pick up a Fisheye
lens. |