2008 PDN PhotoPlus Expo

The trip this past weekend was over in a flash, but it was a fun time. I’ll go over our visit to the PDN PhotoPlus expo in this post and the rest of the trip in another.

After signing in and getting our passes the first place we went was to the Nikon booth since it was right up in the front. They had a very impressive spread, with the usual chopped up D3 to admire. Their camera booth was big and I played around a bit with the D700 since it is the only model of theirs of interest to me that I haven’t had a chance to play with.

From there we made a brief stop at the Canon booth, which was definitely too small. It was smaller than the Nikon booth but there seemed to be a lot more people, many of them trying to see the 50D and 5D Mark II. I checked out the 5D Mark II a few times during the show since it’s the most likely candidate for my next camera but I’ll write more thoughts on it later.

From there we started going through the rest of the show row by row. I checked out NEC and Eizo displays since at some point I’ll probably be looking at getting a new monitor. We also checked out the Phase One booth and Joe and I both discovered a neat feature they were using in Capture One. (We asked them about it and I upgraded my Capture One 4 to the latest version when we got back but it doesn’t seem to have the feature, perhaps they were using the Pro version and it’s not in the standard version). Phase One did happen to be using a Lenovo Thinkpad W700 for their demonstration of Capture One at another booth… it’s big.

The other booths I made a point of stopping by included Olympus, Sigma and Sony. I stopped by Olympus to play with the E3 and check out their micro 4/3 concept rangefinder. It looks snazzy but that leather grip on the front is horrendous. The camera was also bigger than I expected. The E3 disappointed, it felt quite unresponsive for a camera they’re billing as a fairly high end piece of kit. Their big teles were quite impressive though.

At the Sigma booth I wanted to check out the DP2 and play with the DP1 again. I was once again disappointed by the overall responsiveness (or lack thereof) of the DP1. The DP2 didn’t seem a lot different but it didn’t have a memory card to try it out with. It supposedly has a new processor and is supposed to be better optimized for the photographer (do they admit the first wasn’t?) so hopefully that will improve things some. Sigma also had the 200-500 f/2.8 which is an absolute monster of a lens. They had a Canon Rebel mounted to it which seems a bit odd to me, and may have been partly at fault for what seemed like sluggish AF performance. The electronic zoom of the lens is controlled by a huge ring, and while it feels cool to spin the ring, the lens zooms far too slowly and is quite noisy when doing so.

Joe and I both were curious to check out Sony for the A900, which turns out to be quite a nice piece of gear. The viewfinder on it is definitely the best of the new full frame cameras in its price point but I’m still deciding whether I like the overall layout of the camera. Sony’s new 24-70 2.8 really looks and feels quite unique, and their new fancy swiveling flash is interesting but perhaps too bulky in my opinion. We also saw this really tiny white lens (a 200 2.8 I believe) mounted on one of their more compact bodies and were convinced it must be fake.

There were a lot of book publishers there of various types. One of them which had a really nice product was Asukabook. They weren’t cheap and they wanted an awful lot of money to cover your book in leather although “animal friendly” leather was quite a bit less expensive.

Joe also found time at the Hoodman booth to show how goofy the idea of a loupe for your LCD screen is. It made for an interesting experience when Live View was turned on.

We also spent a lot of time checking out papers and other gadgets. I looked at the Spyder 3 and the ColorMunki and have since learned that if I get a new wider gamut display, my Spyder 2 will likely be unable to properly calibrate it. Bummer.

On another note, I’m not sure where ColorVision got their model but I sure hope she was cheap.

That pretty much wraps up everything I want to say about the show right now. It was a good time, there were a lot of interesting things to see and play with and I have found I will probably spend a lot more money. Another post will come soon with photos from the rest of the day when we wandered to various sites in NYC.