Los Angeles Digital Imaging Group Blog

Hi again,

Ok… so people usually ask what were the new cameras at PMA. As I already mentioned the big two, Canon and Nikon had already announced new cameras before the show and most had already started to ship but it was certainly good to see the cameras all in one place. Part of the attraction here is to pick up a new camera and see how it “feels”. It was gratifying to find that the new Canon 1ds mkIII is actually a little lighter that its predecessor but maybe not so surprising the Nikon D3 is even lighter and more comfortable in the hand. As already mentioned the Sony flagship camera, a 24 megapixel beauty with a bevy of new lenses was not available to hold – it looks as though this camera will continue with the memory stick rather than Compact Flash or SD cards of every other professional camera.In general, DSLRs were sporting various anti-shake technologies as well as automatic face recognition that allowed for auto focusing on off center subjects recognized as a face. Panasonic and Samsung were displaying semi-professional DSLRs that had a full range of features that looked very appealing and Pentax also displayed their line of 2/3 sensor cameras that were compatible with lenses from other manufacturers supporting that format, notably Olympus. This is a ploy to appeal to consumers with a wider range of lenses than either camera by itself can support.Then, of course, there are the other cameras – the unusual smaller companies that offer something outside the mainstream. Leica qualifies with their M series rangefinder cameras, though they are the high end of the lot. There is also Minox with a replica of the Leica M3 scaled down to the old 35mm spy camera as a 5 megapixel digital point and shoot. One of my favorites was someone (didn’t quite catch the name of the company) with a smaller scale replica of a Rollie Twin Lens reflex as digital camera – you look down into the pop up hood at the LCD!Gotts Run — there’s more to come!

Hi all, I just got back from a tiring 5 days of teaching, meetings, dinners and miles of walking through tradeshow displays. I haven’t quite digested everything yet but I’ll dash off a few more impressions of the developments in the photo community. My impressions, of course, only represent my personal perspective as an imaging artist working in a primarily commercial context. A lot of the focus of PMA is on the general consumer – the average user who purchases photo related products and the businesses that that are targeting the widest possible market.

This years PMA show seems to continue a shrinking trend that started 10 years ago. In the old days the photo business was going gangbusters and the show was huge! Whole sections were devoted to lab processing equipment, printing equipment of all types, mini-lab specific equipment as well as literally hundreds of camera manufacturers each with their own booth – every conceivable type of photo accessory imaginable. Gone are the massive lab equipment booths and almost all of the smaller camera manufacturers as well as the large variety of mini-lab vendors. The big booths this years were Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Fuji, HP, Epson, Sony, Panasonic and Samsung. Somewhat smaller booths represented Olympus, Pentax, Casio and Leica. Just about every other booth was in the 12×12 and under size!

This may represent a general downturn in convention attendance as the costs of renting and producing trade show exhibits have skyrocketed but one has to wonder if it also has something to do with the disruptive nature of digital technology in general and internet technology more specifically. These days most people can find out everything they need to know about any product at all on the internet. The trade show simply provides a kind of temporal focus for product announcements and an excuse for well-healed attendees to travel to a desirable location to party after hours with a tax credit. Of course a lot of business is conducted at these shows with retailers ordering product for the coming year and various deals struck between marketers, manufacturers, suppliers, importers and product endorsers. The trade show is definitely not dead its just not the behemoth it once was with the displays scaled back to coincide with the general economy of the times.

All that being said, its still fun to go to PMA to be immersed in all things photographic. This year, as it has been for the last few years, it was very clear that “all things photographic” did not include much in the way of film. Film was relegated to a very small display board showing the line of film products in the Kodak and Fuji booths. The bulk of the booth space was devoted to digital products! There were only two other booths that had anything to do with film – one table for a company that did silver reclamation and a small booth for a company that sold wet chemistry processing equipment.

The two most popular themes at the show were photo books and online services. It seemed like every other booth had something to do with one or the other or both! There was a new PMA photo book showcase exhibit with numerous examples of book types, bindings, materials and printing processes represented with different physical book on display with a tabular “score sheet” that rated the quality along several parameters based on a 5 “consumer” panel of judges. The entries ran the gamut from low cost online assembled books to high-end wedding album custom layout coffee table volumes. There were quite a few samples that utilized photo paper pages that laid perfectly flat when open and had no “seam”, just a slight crease such that double page horizontal images were displayed in an uninterrupted manner. Very cool and, it seemed, mostly intended for wedding albums – I thought these binding types would work exceptionally well for fine art portfolios.

Online photo applications were everywhere! Most were variations on web hosting with print fulfillment. upload images and have print requests sent to photo labs. Everyone had some kind of web front end with varying degrees of customization. Some were flat fee types with a sign up fee plus some kind of consistent monthly fee but they were more often than not a revenue sharing model – the web hosting service would provide most of the setup and server space free in exchange for a percentage of the profit from the services sold. Everything could be branded to whoever was fronting the business. Some services targeted individual photographer, some aimed at labs. Quite a few services were offered for camera stores, that had no lab capabilities, to connect to lab services that provided prints, etc… for a percentage of the transaction. All of this, of course was just an additional “middle man” to separate the customer from the final service provider and its hard to image how the profit diffusion could benefit anyone – still, this general idea was very popular with a number of vendors supplying similar web services.

Well… there is more to share, including what I thought was the coolest photo product at the show but I’m going to have to stop here and continue tomorrow when I get a chance to sit down again for a couple of minutes. Right now I have to prepare for a Monday back at work after a week away. Stay tuned for the next PMA installment.

The age of solid state storage memory is arriving. A 64 GB NAND drive in a MacBook AIR costs $900. Mass production of high capacity NAND drives is only now beginning, though, so their price is at a premium.

I paid $2000 for a 2GB Barracuda drive in 1994. Nowadays, cutting edge drives cost 50¢ per GB (Terabyte and up) and older generation drives cost 35¢ a GB.

Watch for rapid price drops and capacity bumps in NAND drives over the coming months (and more over the years).

But, one of the most exciting things in these drives is speed bumps. A partnership between Intel and Micron Technologies is claiming achieving read speeds of 200 MB/Sec and write speeds of 100 MB/Sec for upcoming NAND Drives. We’re looking at a real speed bump in the near future in transfer rates.

Check out the news here

Hi all,

Well… I’m here in Las Vegas for the annual PMA show, thats the Photo Marketing Association trade show – the largest Photography show in the US. I’ve spent the last few days here involved with the DIMA subgroup (Digital Image Marketing Association) as I’m on the board of directors as 2nd Vice President. Of course, that and $5 gets you a Starbucks coffee here in Vegas – however, I’ve been busy with meetings, dinners and various networking activities as well as teaching an all day workshop on RAW file workflow this past Wednesday.

The show itself opened yesterday, occupying all of the south hall of the massive Las Vegas convention center. This is the event where all the photography manufacturers bring out their latest offerings for display. Even though the show is large by any standard, this year felt sort of underwhelming. Things seemed a little quiet and there were no real spectacularly new announcements or new products that hadn’t already been out for several months.

Nikon, Canon, Epson and HP had introduced new things months ago and there was nothing especially new in their booths. Sony had announced a new 24 megapixel DSLR that was rumored to be at the show but the only thing available was a glass display box with the prototype camera and a new collection of lenses, sealed away from eager attendees. There wasn’t even any literature available for the camera.

Of course if you were looking for new photo gear there was plenty of stuff available – just not from the mainstream "big boys". Overall, one could safely say that this was the year of the photobook – it seemed like every other booth had something to do with Photobook software, book binding, book vendors, printers and such. Nikon, Canon, Epson, HP and Kodak had the biggest booths though there was a very strange humongous booth from GE! Yes, that’s General Electric with the familiar logo emblazoned on all the panels –

this huge white space was absolutely empty except for GE employees. They were calling the booth "General Imaging" and it seemed to be about a line of point and shoot cameras but nobody was venturing into this booth. I guess everyone thought it had something to do with light bulbs and nobody was interested.I’ll try and post some more but right now I’m running off to a dinner with DIMA staffers.