pma

LAS VEGAS--Riddle me this: What's green, is 28.6 inches long, weighs 34.6 pounds, and wears a custom-fitted hood?

The answer: a mammoth supertelephoto zoom that Sigma announced this week at the Photo Marketing Association trade show here. The product is geared for photographing wildlife, sports, and astronomical objects.

The lens, called the APO 200-500mm F2.8/400-1,000mm F5.6 EX DG, has a 200-500mm zoom range and an f/2.8 aperture that's very wide for this class of lens. It also comes with an extender that pushes the range to 400-1,000mm but reduces … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Tessera Technologies has agreed to acquire FotoNation, a start-up that sells software cameras can use for tasks such as detecting and tracking faces, fixing flash-induced red-eye, and triggering the shutter only when subjects are smiling and not blinking.

Tessera, a San Jose, Calif.-based electronics miniaturization company, will pay $29 million in net cash and another $10 million if specific milestones within the next year are met.

The companies announced the deal Thursday during the Photo Marketing Association trade show here.

FotoNation, based in Burlingame, Calif., has 80 employees. Its software is used in more than two-thirds of digital … Read more

LAS VEGAS--The heyday of 35mm film SLR cameras is long past, but one foundation of the technology is staging something of a comeback with new help from Sony.

The vast majority of digital single-lens reflex cameras today use an image sensor that's smaller than a full frame of 35mm film, which means lenses behave somewhat differently than on a film camera. For years, only Canon sold SLRs with a full-frame sensor, but Nikon entered the market with its top-end D3 late in 2007. At the Photo Marketing Association trade show Thursday, Sony announced its forthcoming "flagship" Alpha-branded SLR will follow suit. … Read more

As expected, Sony quickly followed its 24-megapixel full-frame sensor announcement by revealing that its previously alluded-to pro model will use the new chip. Since there's a Super SteadyShot housing for the new chip, we can also expect the camera to have in-body image stabilization. The camera is scheduled to "launch" by the end of this year.

Sony also said it will address "the full spectrum" of Alpha products this year, which to me foreshadows a few more product announcements. That's all Sony shared today, but we can expect more details around Photokina this fall. … Read more

JVC rolls out a pair of smaller, more progressive high-definition Everio hard drive-based camcorders to replace its GZ-HD7 and GZ-HD3.

The new models can produce a progressive 60 frames per second 1920x1080 output (in JVC's MPEG-2 format), even though they use the same 10x zoom lenses, and same tiny low-resolution sensors as their predecessors. The HD6 has a 120GB hard drive (rated to hold 10 hours of best-quality video), and a microphone input. It comes in black, while the HD5 comes in silver and has a 60GB drive.

Both models support x.v.Color, Sony's name for xvYCC--the … Read more

LAS VEGAS--The camera companies keep telling me the megapixel race isn't over, but I'd like to see if you have a different opinion.

I'm one of those people who doesn't believe more megapixels necessarily makes for a better digital camera. Sure, at least theoretically having more megapixels permits larger prints and tighter cropping, but it also can impose penalties such as image noise, lousy low-light performance, smeary noise-reduction artifacts, and other drawbacks. There's a trade-off here.

So it's time to vote now for what you'd benefit from more in a camera: more megapixels … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Digital SLRs showed strong growth last year, but the sales surge will begin to moderate, according to a new report by the Camera and Imaging Products Association.

SLR cameras are bulky and expensive, yet they're also responsive, work better in dim conditions, and are flexible because photographers can change lenses. Year-over-year sales of digital SLRs grew 42 percent to 7.5 million units worldwide in 2007, CIPA said this week.

By contrast, the SLR growth rate will dip to 22 percent in 2008, 13 percent in 2009, and 9 percent in 2010, the CIPA predicted. That corresponds to … Read more

LAS VEGAS--A company called Geotate hopes to use an Internet service to lower a significant barrier to the technologically challenging practice of geotagging.

Geotagging, which uses a global positioning system to attach location data to photos to build in more descriptive data, is at present a difficult and largely manual process appealing mostly to serious photo enthusiasts. That's largely because it's too hard right now to build GPS directly into a camera for automated geotagging, so photographers must carry a separate GPS device and then marry the location data to the photos after the fact.

But Geotate, which … Read more

2/1/2008: Thanks to lack of sleep and rusty HTML skills, the previous table entries for the A700 were incorrect. Sorry for my own addition to the confusion. Fixed now. Lori.

I suppose it was inevitable. With its latest camera announcements, Sony brings its scorched-earth camera marketing philosophy--blanketing each price segment with multiple choices in hopes that one combination of design and features hits pay dirt--to consumer digital SLRs. Today's announcement of the Alpha DSLR-A300 and A350 brings Sony's total number of dSLRs in the $700 to $900 range to three. The models, despite some really nice … Read more