Thoughts on Photokina

This year, more than most, the Photokina trade show seemed to produce a lot of interesting news in photography. Most of it filtered down to people outside the industry through sites like Digital Photography Review, who covered the long stream of product announcements from the beginning of August through to the end of the show in late September.

Of course, the big names were there; Canon started with the 50D announcement - which was fairly dull, being an incremental upgrade on the 40D - and finished with the long-awaited 5D Mark II, which brought full HD video to SLRs (a month or so after the other big name, Nikon, launched its D90, also with a movie mode). In between there was the usual string of compact camera announcements, with the most interesting probably being the rather ugly G10.

Personally I've always been fascinated by the market segment the G10 sits in, being somewhere between the SLR and the compact camera. However, the Canon range doesn't really do anything for me any more. Sure, the G10 now goes out to 28mm equivalent, but it's been years since the competition did that. Panasonic, in particular, have always been good at it, and the Leica-badged version of their player there, the DMC-LX3, finally emerged at Photokina. The D-Lux 4 is, somewhat hyperbolically, labelled as the "Son of M8", but it's certainly tempting.

One thing both versions of the camera get right is a commitment to reduce noise. In the press release for the LX3, for example, there's this:

Panasonic also redesigned the peripheral circuits and other components to further minimize noise generation. These enhancements greatly improve imaging performance, boosting both sensitivity and saturation by around 40% compared with ordinary 10-mexapixel compact cameras.

Meanwhile, here's Fuji, whose F30 and F31 still command amazingly good resale prices on the back of their low-light performance:

Fujifilm says its new Super CCD EXR technology will allow its next generation of premium compacts to produce high-ISO images "superior to the F31fd," while also offering improved dynamic range in other shooting conditions. The technology is already fully developed and will be integrated into the first camera in time for a spring 2009 launch.

This is promising news. For a long time, camera manufacturers have been pushing megapixels over quality, with the rare exception - like the aforementioned F30 - still a rarity rather than a market leader. Of course, these are marketing quotes, not from real-world tests, but I'll be keeping a keen eye out for reviews of the cameras as they make it to market.

Panasonic are also involved in another very interesting idea - Micro Four Thirds. This is a new system for interchangable camera lenses, and is apparently "the most significant announcement in the camera market this year" and "an important moment in digital photography's short history". DPReview and Imaging Resource probably do a better job of explaining why than I do, but the summary is that they close the gap between compact and SLR digital cameras by shrinking the latter to the size of the former, whilst still allowing a choice of lenses.

The drawback? By losing the mirror box and pentaprism, these aren't true SLRs: you can't look down the same light path that the sensor will have. However, these days, most compact camera users couldn't care: you can look at a screen on the back and see. not what the sensor will see, but what it is seeing. The G1 - Panasonic's first body in this format - uses an screen that you look at through a SLR-style viewfinder.

However, the camera that seemed to get the most attention - at least if ffffound is anything to go by - is the Olympus prototype, which manages to mount a pancake lens on a so-retro-it-hurts body. Obviously, it's far too early to tell how good the image quality is, but these could well carve out a niche, although I worry they'll find it hard to beat the big players on price. (On the other hand, it won't hurt that as the laggards in the SLR space, behind not only the big two but also Pentax and Sony, Olympus and Panasonic have little to lose.) Certainly I look forward to seeing what the reviews say and how they perform.

It certainly seems to be an interesting time for digital photography, even if it's coming at the expense of film. Now, if only I could carve out the time to actually go out there and start shooting...