The Earnest E. Mau Memorial Award As digital imaging goes mainstream, consumer digicams have become more and more homogenous, with various manufacturers slavishly copying other's more innovative ideas. For those companies who've...
Everywhere you turn in Las Vegas, there are lights flashing, or should we say, flashy lights? And while the Las Vegas Convention Center was not awash in the bright, showy lights of the Strip, still the lights of photography shone in their own small way. As did tripods...
As several manufacturers are releasing new SLR cameras--both 35mm and digital--we're also seeing far more new lenses than we did in the past few months. The new lenses range from very affordable zooms to ultra wides and others...
During the "Digital Summit" panel discussion at the 2003 PMA Show, one of the speakers offered an analogy that's certainly timely. "To paraphrase Mark Twain," he said, "rumors of the demise of film have...
I literally got a charge out of seeing the plethora of chargers and both reusable and primary batteries at PMA this year. (By the way, when you see the word "primary," it's the politically correct term for "throwaway.")...
PMA 2003 abounded in lots of digital gear. There were digital camera bags, digital tripods, and so forth so I went looking for digital lens tissue. I failed to find it but found something better from the clever folks at Hakuba (www.hakubausa.com).
At photokina 2002 I got a glimpse of photography's future and--surprise--it was digital. Was it just a coincidence that the building next door to my Fawlty Towers hotel was called "Planet Pixel?"
As conventional and digital SLR cameras become more and more sophisticated, dedicated flash units must be upgraded in order to remain compatible. Since the camera manufacturers already offer high tech flash units for their systems, we did not see any new...
As Tom Shay from Fuji pointed out, film technology is changing so fast that the manufacturers seldom wait for a show to announce advances or bring out a new film. Consequently, you may have seen announcements about new films before photokina.
Bob Shell was covering medium format cameras and high-end digital; Peter Burian got 35mm SLRs and point-and-shoots; Joe Farace had other digital cameras. And I was the one who got lucky, with rangefinder cameras, large format, and Weird Stuff. ...
In the pages that follow we are proud to share our thoughts and reactions to events at this year's photokina. If you've never heard of photokina it's held every two years in Germany and has established a tradition as the gathering point of...
Everyone's photokina is different. We look for what interests us; we discover different things by accident; we see (to a considerable extent) what we want to see. Admittedly, we are also helped or hindered by the manufacturers' willingness to tell us...
Let's be honest: tripods are worthy but dull, so I'll dive straight in with the Weird Stuff--that is, with the products that defy ready categorization, but are either highly desirable or extremely unusual or sometimes both. Let's start at...
In the past, we have always found at least a half dozen new SLR cameras at the photokina trade show. That has changed, at least for now, as most manufacturers devote their R&D resources to digital equipment. During my five days of touring the many...