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Friday round-up from PMA
By Bob Martin and Phil Hall in Las Vegas
Event news
02 February 2008 21:07
After the epic day on Thursday, we had another one lined-up on Friday too, with Panasonic, Samsung, Fuji and Olympus to see.
First off, we popped over to Panasonic. For the last few years Panasonic have been leading the way with wide-angle lenses in compacts and this year is no exception. We’ve just had a cheeky look at the new Lumix FX35 with an impressive wide-angle setting of 25mm. We’d like to see this on more cameras and wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes more common over the next year or so. Then on the opposite side of the focal range scale the TZ5 comes complete with a 10x zoom (28-280mm). Not bad in such compact body. We anticipate a good year for Panasonic’s compact range as it improves on one of the best ranges on the market already.
After that, it was a short walk over to the Samsung stand. Naturally they were pushing their new D-SLR, the GX-20. Side-by-side next to the Pentax K20D, they’re almost identical, but with subtle design differences. Obviously they were showing off their new 14.6Mp CMOS they’d developed, and the science and thought that had gone into it - lots of diagrams! A substantial amount of their stand was dedicated to the technology they’ve developed and incorporated into their cameras too - from their compacts to D-SLRs, including contrast control, Face Detection and better viewing angles for their LCD screens.
While there are no new D-SLRs from Fuji this year, landscape photographers can look forward to the FinePix S100FS. Yes that is right, FS not FD, which stands for Film Simulation not Face Simulation which some idiots at the show thought. These modes are designed to give traditional photographers the colours that they used to get from the classic Fuji films such as Velvia and Provia. It’s essential a bridge camera like the models that have done well for Fuji over the last few years, such as the popular S9600. Not only does the focal range go down to 28mm to cater for wide-angle shots as landscape snappers would want but also goes up to 400mm as well. Although the price in the UK will be fairly high for a bridge camera this really is an all-in-one in the truest sense and we are looking forward to testing it out in the field.
Olympus is another of the manufacturers not to launch a D-SLR at PMA this year, and rather disappointingly hasn’t announced any new lenses either. But then when you are faced with the complete line-up of FourThirds lenses in front of you, it doesn’t take long to realise that it’s a substantial range and actually there’s not that many areas where gaps need filling or optics need updating.
We’ve just seen a couple of tidy new compacts that replace current models. This includes a new mju1030 SW which replaces Bob’s favourite extreme compact the mju770. This was displayed on the stand next to a fish tank, which we took great delight in throwing the camera into the tank and splashing unsuspecting visitors - it was also encased in a block of ice too! Also from Olympus was the 18x zoom compact SP-560 UZ, with a lens coverage of 26-520mm, with a resolution of 10Mp.