You would think that PMA-Photo Marketing Association would be the best source of information for what went on at their annual show, PMA 2008 this year, which shows off in Las Vegas all that is happening in the world of photography. Well, not exactly. For some reason, the PMA puts on a humdinger of a show but all signs of its existence disappear almost completely from the organization’s website. Fortunately there are a lot of reasonable good resources that help fill in the blanks:
1001 Noisy Cameras – this a blatent rumour mill, but hey are not we all hawkers
DPReview – continue to be the standard on PMA camera reports
Imaging Resources – they have videos as well as printed reports on PMA cameras and stuff
Gizmodo – is like 1001 Noisy but a bit more savvy on photo trends
The big trends which we spotted here are the blending of video camera features into digital SLR (Casio EXLIM HD and very fast 60FPS shotmaking, Nikon D3’s very lowlight and fast FPS shooting capabilities)and point and shoot cameras(HD recording capabilities for Canon PowerShot TX-1, Panasonic’s TZ5 and FX35, Samsung’s NV24HD, and some Kodak EasyShare cameras). Second, the continuing proliferation of digital SLR cameras as Nikon and Canon are in a brutal features (but not yet price war). Meanwhile Pentax, Samsung, Sony, Olympus, and Fuji, and Sigma are all try to break into the digital SLR camera gravy train. For example, right now the new Nikon D60 at $700++ costs more than ACER dual core 64bit 2GHz, 2GB of memory, 160GB hard drive, 17″ screen laptop… and all the other PMA 2008 new DSLR models generally cost more $700
Third and finally, the resolution of the conflict between on-camera-lens versus in-camera-body image stabilization has still not worked out. Nikon and Canon are in the on-the-lens-stabilizers camp while the catch-up boys – notably Olympus, Pentax, Samsung and Sony are using on the body stabilization. With those cameras offering 2-3 stops better images – I suspect the body will become the place to image-stabilize. Otherwise SLRs will give away an advantage to their Camcorder brethren which are starting sport some distinct still camera capabilities.
Finally I had expected to see some new printing technology like the Memjet or rumored HP high definition printers at the PMA show … but very little was in evidence. It appears this will have to wait until PhotoKina later this year.