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Sunday, September 23, 2012

Photokina 2012

The Bi annual Photo imaging fair which is held in Cologne, Germany is a show case for the entire photo industry. Manufactures from all aspects of imaging show up, ranging from camera manufacture to lens makers to printers. You name it they are there. The usual suspects in the SLR world showed some new camera Nikon had launched the D600  a week before Photokina and Canon responded with the EOS 6D. Sony showed off their Alpha series of cameras and all are great. For the first time a full frame sensor cameras are in grasp of ordinary mortals. They are not cheap when you compare it with the low end SLR but when you compare them with their big brothers they are cheap. (Theory of relativity... well sort of. You get the point.)

What was great to see was the evolution of  mirror less cameras, they seem to coming of age. Sony is leading the charge and they even showed off their camcorders with inter changeable lenses. Since Nikon is still using Sony sensors in its cameras it is only a matter of time before Nikon will launch a mirror less high end camera. With HD video being a standard and the camcorders launched by Sony, I expect many more artist making movies as the tools of imagery are getting cheaper. (This is awesome we will now have movies made by directors and actors who want to make a movie and not because they can afford to make one)

One surprise of the fair were Nokia. They may be getting hammered when it comes to smart phones but they are putting in some amazing photographic sensors in their phones. Their 808 PureView and recently launched Nokia Lumia 920 both have Carl Zeiss lenses and a F2 lens on it, which is awesome for low light. It also features image stabilization and the brightest LED flash, for all you know it might become camera of choice...err phone of choice photographers...only time will tell.

One of my favourites also launched a new lens, the Lensbaby Spark. It has a fixed focal length of 50 mm and a fixed aperture of f5.6. It is suppose to make it easier to control the sweet spot. I don't know if I would purchase this one, but I think is to get people to get into the Lensbaby system at a very low price (priced at $80)

Printing space also saw some action. Canon and HP launched new printers. Canon replacing the high end prosumer inkjet printers and HP with it industrial printers. The Canon printer will have a price sometime in November. The printer now seems a very good option for those photographers wanting to do their own printing. While there were many thing that happened at Photokina and since I was not there, this is just a small list of things which really caught my attention. I highly recommend you check out what happened at Photokina if you are looking to purchase cameras or do your own printing.

Check out the following link on Engadget which has a detailed coverage of Photokina

Photokina 2012 wrap-up: Canon, Nikon, lust-worthy Leicas, a full-frame Sony compact and more