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For what it's worth, the consensus about the 2009 Photo Marketing Association show seems to be that it wasn't as bad as everyone expected. The mood was low-key, many of the booths were half empty, and several manufacturers were notably absent--like Adobe and Epson--while others only had meeting rooms.
Nonetheless, several announcements managed to generate some buzz, and most of the manufacturers I spoke with agreed that their business-to-business business at the show was quite productive. Despite the economy, tons of new products debuted, partly because planning takes place 6 to 12 months out. So it's likely that the first real signs of contraction will appear with the fall product lines. And, in fact, at least one manufacturer has already changed its dSLR release plans in preparation for tough times.
The biggest hits of the show seemed to be Sony's Cyber-shot DSC-HX1, a CMOS-based megazoom with a novel shooting mode that creates panoramas on the fly as you pan across the scene, and the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH1, a video-capture enabled version of its interchangeable-lens G1. What has everyone excited about the camera is how much control you have over depth of field when shooting video, a capability you usually only get with relatively expensive pro camcorders. And unlike the dSLR video implementations in cameras like the Nikon D90 and Canon EOS 5D Mark II, because the GH1 lacks a mirror it supports AF while shooting; in conjunction with the camera the company introduced a new Lumix G Vario HD f4-5.8 14-140mm lens which by design has a quieter focus motor so that the microphone doesn't pick up the noise.
... Read moreAlthough it looks like something you'd hang from your rearview mirror next to the fuzzy dice, Datacolor's SpyderCube is actually an ingenious tool for maximizing the dynamic range and obtaining neutral white balance for your digital photographs. Datacolor describes the SpyderCube as "the first all-in-one raw calibration device for fast and accurate whitepoint correction as well as bracketed adjustments for highlights and blacks," which I find a bit misleading, but it nonetheless seems as if it has the potential to aid those of us who batch process large numbers of images shot under consistent but uncontrolled lighting.
The term I take issue with is "calibration device," because it makes it sound as if you're somehow optimizing the camera's behavior by using it. You're not; you're optimizing your processing of the resulting image files. You photograph it to define a reference white point, black point, and various other characteristic points that you then use to more accurately and consistently retouch photos--or create a profile based on it for batch processing of the photos--shot under those lighting conditions. In fact, I suspect if you tried to use the entire cube for setting manual white balance in the camera, the closest a camera offers to calibration, it would send too much data and confuse the system (I haven't yet tried it; this is based on my discussion with the company when the product was just a spec.)
That said, it seems far more useful than a simple white/gray reference point. Since it's three dimensional, it picks up illumination characteristics of the scene that a flat card can't; the addition of a black point gives you the ends of the range over which to set your levels adjustments and the various gray chips provide midtone points.
For $59, it might be a useful little device to toss in your camera bag. It's scheduled to enter our dimension in March.
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HD Everio GZ-HD6
(Credit: JVC America)JVC rolls out a pair of smaller, more progressive high-definition Everio hard drive-based camcorders to replace its GZ-HD7 and GZ-HD3.
The new models can produce a progressive 60 frames per second 1920x1080 output (in JVC's MPEG-2 format), even though they use the same 10x zoom lenses, and same tiny low-resolution sensors as their predecessors. The HD6 has a 120GB hard drive (rated to hold 10 hours of best-quality video), and a microphone input. It comes in black, while the HD5 comes in silver and has a 60GB drive.
Both models support x.v.Color, Sony's name for xvYCC--the international standard for wide-color space within moving images--for better color reproduction on some TVs (currently Sony Bravias and maybe some newer JVC models support it).
In addition, the previous models had issues with subpar optical-image stabilizers that JVC says it has fixed. We also thought they were overpriced; at $1,399 for the HD6 and $1,119 for the HD5, they might still be. We're reserving judgment for now. They'll both be available in March.
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