Roger W. Hicks

The time-honored Shutterbug Weird Stuff category is for all the products that don't fit in anywhere else: the sort of thing where a friend who was at the show tells you, "You wouldn't believe what I saw..." As well as the glorious examples in the subhead, we can add online caricatures, limpet-mine camera supports, Internet telephones, dental...

Here’s another in our series of reports from photokina 2012. As you will have noticed we do not attempt to create a laundry list of new products and companies from the show, but prefer to report on what struck our eye and thought might be of special interest to Shutterbug readers. In this report Roger Hicks tells us about numerous instances of life in the film arena he found at the show, with special cameras, film, paper, and even processors part of the mix.—Editor

While a host of new digital cameras at photokina were covered in the January, 2013, issue of Shutterbug, this report focuses on some new out-of-the-mainstream cameras; new Zeiss and Schneider lenses designed to take advantage of ultrahigh-resolution sensors; and a couple of inkjet innovations that even I regarded as interesting. I say “even I” because I regard inkjet printing as being about as interesting as watching paint dry, which, after all, is what it is. Scanners will be covered under a future accessories report.

Sixty years is a long time, and it is easy to forget how different life was in those days. In particular, the normal format for snapshots was a black and white contact print just 21⁄4x31⁄4” (6x9cm nominal, 8-on-120 or 620). Enlargements (except “en-prints”) were rare and expensive, and in any case, many of the films of the day were grainy and unsharp when enlarged...