Photokina 2008 and the Hype

---

It's that time of the year again and photography forums around the world are buzzing with all the hype surrounding Photokina 2008. Photokina is the worlds biggest trade fair for photographic and imaging equipment and is held every two years at the Cologne trade fair in Germany. Leading up to Photokina (which opens on Tuesday September 23rd) the industry is abuzz with rumours and new releases.

It's quite amazing to witness all the hype and excitement that leads up to the start of this fair and often it's hard not to get caught up in it. As the camera manufacturers start releasing snippets of information about their new models the rumour mill begin to work overtime and dreams up all kinds of outlandish wishlists and feature-sets. When a manufacturer does finally release their specifications for a new camera the whiners and complainers start to kick in moaning about this missing feature or that unwanted functionality. Anything to beef up their post count on their favourite forums I guess? Sometimes it's quite laughable to beat witness to.

So let's focus on some facts here and talk about some of the news that has caught my interest and in particular Canon news as that is where my investments lie.

Canon's biggest announcement so far is of course their upgrade to the 'venerable' 5D. The Canon 5D Mark II was possibly overdue according to some pundits and by and large I don't think it has failed to impress. You can read a full review of the camera here on the DPReview.com site and even a hands-on summary. Key features of course must be the 21 mega-pixel full-frame sensor and the inclusion of HD 1080 video capture. Ironically both of these features are the ones causing most consternation amongst the photographers that I've spoken to.

They're saying: "Do we really need so many mega-pixels. Why are Canon chasng the mega-pixel marketing myth when we are still missing some key features".
They're also saying: "Why do we have video capture in a still camera. Why is this included, which is pushing up the overall cost of the camera when in fact R&D could've been better spent focusing on the refinement of some other essential features?"

In summary, here are the Canon 5D Mark II's Key Features

∙ New 21.1 Megapixel CMOS sensor with improved EOS Integrated Cleaning System (E.I.C.S.)
∙ New Full HD 1080 resolution movie recording
∙ 3.9 frames per second continuous shooting
∙ High performance DIGIC 4 providing superb image quality
∙ Maximum 310 large JPEG images in a single burst with a UDMA card
∙ 3.0” VGA (920k dots) Clear View LCD
∙ ISO 100-6400 (expansion from 50 up to 25,600)
∙ 9 AF points + 6 Assist AF points

I'm inclined to agree with some of the complainers. The 5D is traditionally a wedding photographers camera (yes, that's a generalisation I know) and many wedding photographers really don't need 21.1 mega-pixels. The video - while a nice feature to be sure - still comes across as a bit of a gimmick and not a real feature needed by hard core pro's that will likely use this camera. It certianly seems more like a marketing feature and an attempt to keep up with the likes of Nikon and Sony? Proper dedicated video cameras will do a better job for some time to come. Let still camera's take still photographs. Let video camera's take movies. No doubt the technologies are merging, but is it ready for prime time? I'm not so convinced?

To me the 5D Mark II is still missing some basic key features that the community has been going on about for a long time. Where is a simple one-click mirror lock up button for those landscape photographers? Why are there so few focusing points? Why are the focusing points so poorly arranged as not to facilitate the focus-recompose problem. Canon needs to spread their focusing points out a bit more, more in line with good composition (rule-of-thirds and the like). Improved AF functionality is still not there. Why not spend more money on f/2.8 vertical and horizontal focusing sensors or more focusing points? 3.9 frames per second still seems very low for a camera in 2008. Granted it's moving 21.1 megapixels of data with each frame but that's not the point is it? A 16mp camera at a frame rate of 8-10 frames per second would probably be more welcome? The 5D Mark II has a Digic 4 processor which is great, however given the other misgivings a dual Digic 4 might have been better received as well for better image processing at a faster rate. Perhaps Canon reserve this kind of high-end functionality for the 1D range?

Nevertheless, for photographers in the market for an upgrade at this point I am sure that the 5D Mark II is quite compelling on many fronts and will probably be snapped up at it's very reasonable price of USD2,700. For a 21.1MP camera compare this price to the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III and those of us that bought this camera are hurting a bit at this price differential. That's the nature of Moore's law of techology I'm afraid.

What else is interesting from the Canon stable at this stage. Lens wise they've come out with a Canon 24mm f/1.4 L II USM lens. Ok, but it doesn't really catch my eye I'm afraid to say - more of a niche lens? At the PMA in March the 800mm f/5.6 was announced. Now that's much more compelling but for a whole bunch of different reasons for me in particualr being primarily a nature/bird shooter.
I have to be honest and say that for a point-and-shoot Canon's release of the Canon Powershot SX10 IS looks very interesting indeed. This looks like a great camera. I'm not in the P&S market but if I was - very nice indeed.



Leica have released their incredibly expensive Leica f/0.95 50mm lens. Ridiculously priced at £6290 and yet really an amazing piece of light gathering equipment. I can't really imagine using a f/0.95 lens? That's better eyesight than an Owl?
Sony have released their own high-end camera, the A900. At 24.6 megapixels they have also entered the megapixel war with vengeance and certainly there are some compelling reasons to look into the specifications of this camera if you don't already have a significant investment in Canon or Nikon glass?
Nikon's D90 also looks great no doubt.
For the consumer there's a veritable plethora of choices in the marketplace at this stage provided you have the spare cash and the wherewithal to make the right choices.

There are all sorts of other interesting oddities coming out of Photokina, like's Sandisks' 32GB CF cards, Epson P-7000 portable hard drives/video players and Adobe's announcement of Adobe Photoshop CS4 which is due to take place on the 23rd.

Now I was complaining about the rumour mongering at the beginning of this blog, so perhaps I shouldn't even begin to discuss Photoshop CS4, but what the hell; let's tread dangerously shall we?

Adobe have been extremely tight-lipped about CS4 and there really is quite a lot of excitement pending this release. There are naturally many nay-sayers, back-biters and critics alike about the Adobe product line but the fact remains that Photoshop is the most widely used imaging product in the marketplace. More people; professional and amateur alike use Photoshop to adjust, touch-up and manipulate their photographs than any other product. Adobe themselves have diminished some of that market share lately with the release of Lightroom and then you can throw into the mix Apple's Aperture, Corel's product line and many other smaller simpler applications. However, Photoshop; the behemoth that it is still remains the king (for now).

So what does the rumour mill have to say about Adobe CS4?
Two of the most sigificant features to look out for at the announcement on the 23rd are 64-bit support and the off-loading of some of the intensive processing on the graphics processing unit (GPU) of today's highly sophisticated graphics cards.

I have a big investment in my desktop of course with dual 64-bit processors and a very sophisticated NVidia GeForce 8800 GTX with 768MB RAM (yes I'm aware that this GPU is a bit old now but still delivers a massive computational punch which seems a shame to waste on high-end games and video only?). If Adobe Photoshop CS4 can see a marked improvement in overall image processing time with 64-bit and effective GPU usage then I think this will be a huge win regardless of any other improvements. Running complicated lighting filters and touching up massive 100MB tiff files could become a dream with proper use of all this computing power.

It's important to realise that a simple move to 64-bit processing is not a panacea to all of Photoshop's woes. The application doens't simply become faster overnight. It has to be effectively engineered by Adobe to make proper use of the dual-pipeline architecture and a larger addresable memory space to be more effective. A properly implemented 64-bit application will be able to process in-memory those massive stitched landscapes without having to rely on so much disk swapping which is notoriously slow and this is what in general hurts Photoshop. (Can you say roll-on solid-state drives?)

It goes without saying that Adobe has plenty of scope with which to imporve on their current CS3 release and you just have to read some of the complaints at the Dear Adobe site to be bemused and enlightened.

Roll-on Photokina 2008! We look forward to seeing what other exciting releases you have in store for us!

Please feel free to leave me some feedback by clicking on the comments hyperlink at the top of each blog entry (just under the date). Would love to hear your thoughts. Many thanks.

---