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Thursday round-up from PMA
By Bob Martin and Phil Hall in Las Vegas
Event news
01 February 2008 23:02
With back-to-back meetings at the show, Thursday was a busy day - sorry for the delay on this one, team.
So, after Sony we headed over to the Pentax stand and had a run through of Pentax’s two new D-SLRs - the K20D and K200D.
The guys there told us that now they are happy with their D-SLR line-up, the company will be focusing (excuse the pun) on producing and expanding their lens range. They had a couple of the new lenses there for us to have a look at including the new telephoto and super zoom lenses and the 55mm f/1.4 DA* as well.
Regarding the Samsung partnership, Pentax are keen to tell us that they know what photographers want and Samsung have the R&D technology to implement it. Perhaps we’ll find out from Samsung later today what their views on this are…
Despite the fact that Canon are the undisputed kings of the digital photography world, their meeting room was hidden away actually out of the Convention Center (apologies for the spelling but when in Rome and all that). We had the strangest meeting of the visit so far. We were honoured to meet Masanori Uchidoi, Group Executive of Photo Products Group for Canon. Via and interpreter and with only 15 minutes of his time, we had an opportunity to find out his thoughts on the photographic market and see if we could get any inkling of what was planned for the future. As you would expect though, he was staying tight-lipped on future products - we weren’t the first and we wouldn’t be the last that day to ask about the 5D replacement. He was adamant though that there wouldn’t be a APS-C sensor in a Canon compact, but wanted to make bigger Photosites for their compact cameras. He remained confident though of Canon’s ability to fight off the ever strengthening competition. Only time will tell…
Walking back into the main show, we had our final meeting of the day at Sigma. Now, we’ll be honest and say that we didn’t expect to see Sigma’s DP1 compact ever see the light of day - it’s been previewed in various forms for over 18 months now. But it’s finally arrived! It features a 14Mp Foveon APS-C sized sensor - the same found in Sigma’s SD14 D-SLR. It looks like it could shape up to be an ideal photographer’s compact camera.
So, that was Thursday - more tomorrow!