Wednesday, February 6, 2008

PMA 2008 News

Well, the PMA show (Photographic Marketing Association) came and went last week and there were a few noteworthy items that showed up. Canon has a new digital Rebel, the Rebel XSi. It now has a 12-mp sensor, Live View (sort of like what point & shoot cameras have), and uses SD cards instead of CompactFlash cards. The expected replacement for the 5D wasn’t shown, but since this is a Photokina (that’s the big European trade show) year, it might show up in the Fall. Nikon has a few new lenses: a AF-S 60mm f/2.8G Micro lens and a PC-E 24mm f/2.8D tilt-shift lens. From Casio, not exactly a leader in digital cameras, comes the Pro EX-F1, which looks like a small SLR and has the astounding shoot rate of 60 frames per second at full 6-mp resolution. I guess you better have a big memory card for this camera. I’m not really sure what this will be good for (motion studies? scientific research?), but that’s truly amazing performance.



Fuji showed a good camera for people who want D-SLR performance, but don’t want to change lenses: the S100FS. It has a wide-range image-stabilized lens, equivalent to a 28-400mm 35mm lens, and has an 11-mp sensor. If you want high performance and only one camera, you might take a look at this one.



Perhaps the most curious camera shown was a unnamed prototype also from Fuji: a folding 6x7 medium format film camera with Aperture Priority automatic exposure. Since they discontinued all their medium format cameras a few years ago, this was a surprise to say the least. Still for the film fans out there, this will probably be a great camera to shoot with—small, portable, and with a tack sharp lens on it. Some of my favorite and most used view camera lenses were made by Fuji. You can see a photo of this new camera here. It’s kind of pretty, in a nostalgic sort of way.

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