If Day 1 at Photokina was all about product launches then Day 2 was all about - well, other stuff. We got hands on with some very tasty kit (and were told to keep our hands off other kit), talked to some of the top people in industry about their views on the future, saw people getting full body scans - oh and we met Evel Knievil. But first more product announcements.
Huge compact flash cards
Things are still moving fast in the flash memory world. On the day that Pretec announced a 16GB thumb drive, SanDisk went one better and launched a slightly more useful compact flash card with a capacity of 16GB. They currently have the largest compact flash card ever made but somehow we can't see that record lasting for long.
The card will hold a bewildering four thousand 7MP jpeg files at typical compression rates. That doesn't mean much to a lot of people so it was calculator time again. If you go on a 14 day holiday of a lifetime and pack a 7MP camera equipped with this card, you could take one picture every 5 minutes day and night and never have to reload. Of course the card is really designed for professional users so you might expect somebody toting a 12MP DSLR to load up with it to shoot jpegs for a newspaper. If they were covering a 90 minute football game, a 16GB would allow them to shoot a little under one frame per second. Take two and even today's high performance batteries might not last the match.
You might need to be on premiership style wages to use too many of the cards though - retail price is expected to be just over $1,000.
Fujifilm S5
Yep, Monday they announced it, Tuesday we got to play with it. Kind of. Apart from a live demonstration several feet away, the only S5 on display was "on display" in a locked Perspex cabinet. All the literature was stamped “preliminary information” and when I talked to Fujifilm I was told that the final specification may well change between now and the launch in February. I really got the feeling that this camera isn't yet ready for the world but it's such an important camera that Fujifilm had to announce if for Photokina.
Even looking at it through Perspex one thing was pretty clear - it's a D200 body with Fujifilm knowhow on the inside. That's a pretty powerful combination - the D200 is a tough camera and laid out with the excellent ergonomics of the Nikon prosumer range. The sensor and firmware that Fujifilm have packed inside it make some very attractive claims - not least an extended dynamic range and extremely low noise. I asked how the S5 will compare with the S3 for speed. “It will be faster”. Which is a relief.
Whilst chatting with Fujifilm, I got the chance to play with their new face recognition cameras. Amazingly this works rather well - point the camera at a group of people and the face of the primary subject is outlined in red and up to 9 other faces are outlined in white. The system isn't perfect yet - it has a hard job recognising faces if the person is slightly turned away from the camera - but it opens up some exciting possibilities. At the moment the cameras can base exposure calculations on just the faces in the picture to ensure that they have a great range of skin tones. They can also instantly zoom to the faces on playback to show critical image sharpness. In the future it's easy to see this as an enabling technology - for example it would be possible to apply different levels of noise reduction or smoothing to areas of a picture depending on the image content reducing the amount of post processing to get a great retouched portrait. We've already seen cameras that can make you slimmer - maybe the next breed of Fujifilm cameras will make you look younger.
Leica M8
How do Leica get away with it? The M8 is a slab of metal with some of the corners rounded off with some plastic buttons grafted slightly clumsily on the back. You'd imagine that this would be a very ugly camera - but you'd be dead wrong. Something about the quality of the metal or the uncompromising design or maybe just the Leica name makes this a strangely beautiful camera.
The one we got to try was pretty firmly screwed down and either the batteries had run flat or Leica had removed them but we could still play with the rangefinder focusing and marvel at the view through the quality lenses.
There may of course be no real point in lusting after one though - even at around 4 thousand pounds we hear that he first year's production is already sold out.
Image storage devices
Everywhere we looked, it seemed that every manufacturer had a hard drive based image storage device. We talked about these yesterday and said that many users may find them too big and expensive to meet their image storage needs. The manufacturers certainly don't agree with us - we counted at least 5 companies with portable hard drives - some with screens and at least one (strangely a Sony) without. The ones with screens look the part though - clearly a lot of your money goes on producing a gorgeous bright sharp and colourful screen too check your snaps.
Evil Knievel
We're still not sure if it was really him and we've certainly no idea why he would be there but Sony's stand featured a large display area with a sign saying “Evel Knievel” on it. When we passed later sure enough there was a guy sitting at it dressed in cowboy clothes with a prominent “EK” logo on them. I have no idea what this has to do with photography in general or Sony in particular but as a child I always wanted one of his stunt motorcycle toys so of course I stopped for a picture.
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