Reports from the PhotoPlus Expo, Part I
For the 25th year in a row, the photography industry is converging on New York for the Photoplus Expo. Since companies always push for October/November releases to take advantage of the holiday season, it's a perfect opportunity to try out the latest and greatest. I spent all day testing equipment and taking to representatives from companies big and small, and will discuss some of my favorites. My reviews always skew toward user experience and what niche a product might play in your life instead of exhausting, rigorous tests, and will be doubly so when using products that usually have security standing around making sure you don't use it in any way they don't want you to (in one weird extension, not only did Nikon not want people taking pictures of the new 50mm f/1.4G, they tried to keep people from taking pictures of it.)
The big stories of the year in the DSLR world are higher resolution at lower prices and movie modes, and the Canon 5d Mark II is where those two things interact. With a movie mode more robust than the Nikon D90 and nearly 22 megapixels, this camera performs the hard feat of being a bargain at around $2,700. It's hard to say anything bad about it -- but there is one thing that even the Canon rep admitted had them scratching their heads. The autofocus module hasn't been updated one bit from the more than three-year-old 5D. That means the AF module in even the Rebel line is now more advanced than what otherwise could be considered a flagship camera. Canon explained that "no one was complaining about the 5D autofocus." Indeed, the center point on the 5D works very well in decent light, but clearly they haven't spent much time on the Internet, where everyone finds something to complain about. The good news is that an AF assist light has been added, which will help wedding photographers, who have often complained about shooting moving subjects with the 5D in the dark.
Both the 5D and the new 50D have live view modes that feature face-detection AF. As Live View and movie modes become popular, you will see more and more features trickling up from point-and-shoots, instead of the other way around.
Canon has also released an 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 IS lens, an answer to the extremely popular Nikon version. You can see it here extended to 200mm on the 50D. While there is some optical trade-off from pro zooms, if you can live with the slower aperture it's a fairly sharp, contrasty lens with a fantastically useful zoom range and good close-focus capabilities, worlds better than the superzooms we had even just a few years ago.
Casio wins the "most inventive display" award. To show off the capabilities of their super-high-frame-rate cameras, the EX-FH20 and the EX-F1, they had a group of apparently tireless cheerleaders jumping and throwing each other around. While motion-stopping is a function of a camera's high ISO quality and maximum aperture, in well-lit environments these cameras are particularly useful for turning high speed events into slow-motion replay.
I can only imagine what they spent on liability insurance.
Comments