Times change. Last year, dye sublimation snapshot printers were all the rage. This year the focus on printers at PMA was on permanence with more and more printers available with archival image-printing capabilities. Many included the availability of multiple cartridges capable of using pigment-based inks for creating long-lasting, gallery-quality output. The upside is, of...
Today's high-resolution digital cameras eat up lots of memory. High-capacity memory cards cost as much as a portable hard drive, so why not use a portable storage device and transfer card memory to that drive? Portable hard drives are battery-driven and most employ a 2.5" disk drive, while a few use the more expensive 1.8" drive. As an alternative there are...
Argraph introduced several brand-new Sunblitz Digital Lighting Products. The Sunblitz DAF 4500C ETTL is designed to work with Canon digital SLR and film cameras and has a GN (Guide Number) of 135 at ISO 100. The Sunblitz A 6000 Macro Ring Flash provides shadow-free light for medical, industrial, and creative subjects. It has a GN of 40, works with cameras having filter...
Digital SLRs In Previews; The Four Thirds System Gains Adherents; Pigment Ink Printers Abound; And Some CE Bedfellows For Venerable Photo Industry Names
In late February a team of Shutterbug reporters descended on the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida, to find out what's in store for photographers in the year ahead. The odd air of something missing...
Our Picture This! assignment this month was simply "Fog and Light," and readers responded with a host of gorgeous images that made the most of this very mysterious weather condition. As we looked through the pictures it became clear to us that readers responded to fog in the way it played with light and shadow and how it faded some colors and emboldened others. Many...
If there's anything you can count on with digital products, it's faster speeds, higher capacities, and lower costs. Nowhere is this truer than with memory cards. There was plenty of news from a variety of vendors.
SanDisk doubled the capacity of several of their most popular cards, including the Extreme III line of cards to 8GB in CompactFlash, and 2GB...
Anyone who tells you medium format is dead hasn't seen the recent spate of products coming from all of the major players in the medium format market. If PMA is any indication at all, medium format digital is not only alive, it's thriving.
Hasselblad had the new H2D-39 on display in a private area. A solid digital update to the H1 system, the new version...
There was only one major large format printer announcement at PMA, but what an announcement! Canon showed off the new imagePROGRAF iPF5000 printer. This is brand-new from the inside out. Canon's first 17" wide photo printer, the $1945 iPF5000 is a direct competitor to the Epson Stylus Pro 4800. The printer features Canon's new Lucia pigment inks in 12 colors.
Every year the PMA Show becomes increasingly digital in its scope, with fewer exhibitors of "traditional" products. The 2006 show confirmed this trend but surprisingly, most of the new lenses (of familiar brands) are of the multi-platform type: suitable for 35mm cameras and digital SLRs with small (APS-C size) or full-frame sensors. That may not prove to be a...
The obvious big news at this year's show was the "proliferation" of pigmented ink-based printers--and with that comes a new level of inks and print longevity. We used to think that pigmented inks could not deliver the color saturation and punch of dye-based inks, but that no longer appears to be the case with this new generation of inksets with expanded...