I’ve been going to PMA for a long time ... at least 25 years.  I’ve missed a few, but not many, and have witnessed many changes over the years, especially in the past 10, as digital imaging and then digital capture changed the landscape of the photographic industry.

This year it again seems as though PMA seems to be getting smaller.  Perhaps not much smaller than last year, but it did seem smaller.  I suppose part of the change is you don’t need huge booths to show all that huge photographic equipment that used to dominate the show.  Over the past years PMA has partnered with other related industries, the most recent being the scrap-booking industry.  While there was a small presence of scrap-booking this year, it was substantially less than the past couple of years, and pretty insignificant.

Much of my time at PMA is spent in back-rooms with specific companies that we have major relationships with.  With the little extra time I have, I normally walk the floor, and then spend time at a few booths, renewing old friendships, comparing some things I’m interested in, or perhaps exploring something new.

NOT MUCH NEW ...

To me there has always been two types of new at a PMA.  First you have the natural progression of technology by companies as they improve their offerings and try to create a need for a new something. This category can be broken down further into “new” at PMA, or recently introduced so PMA offers many their first chance to look closely at it. The new Nikons are an example of this natural progression in technology, as Nikon finally realizes that CMOS full size sensors belong in their camera bodies. It’s been a while since they were introduced, but to some (especially us Canon shooters) this is something “new” to check out.  Sometimes this type of “new” is announced as part of the show, such as Sony’s unusual move of announcing a new 25mp full frame sensor, then a day later announcing their intention of building a camera to put that sensor in (seems like the camera was the big news).

Then there’s the really new ... something that portends a change in the wind.  I’ve seen that in the past, but this year I really didn’t see anything that left me with that impression. There does seem to be  a maturing of several things that have been becoming mainstream over the past few years.  So anyway, here in no particular order are some observations ...

BOOKS

A couple of years ago, books hit PMA like a truck. Last year it seemed nearly every booth had something related to making books.  This year books still stood out as a major theme, but it seems to have matured,  with not as many startup ideas, more practical solutions, and most notably the evolution of the software.

There are two types of books.  One type caters to the higher end, such as wedding and portrait photographers, or perhaps landscape and fine art photographers.  These type of books are usually impressive with beautiful hard bound covers, and normally stunning print quality inside. Then there are the “amateur” books ... iPhoto books if you will.  While still very nice, they are far less expensive, lower in overall quality and impact, and really target more of an end user market, rather than a professional who is reselling the book to a client.

There are many choices, but I think what is significant is the evolvement of the software to make the creation of books easy and more exciting.  Current data indicates that most end users (which is the larger part of this market) who start the book creation process rarely end up finishing the process, let alone purchasing a book.  Currently it is estimated that only about 1 in 5 actually order a book. How do you get past that ?  You make the creation process automatic, and the result of the process quite appealing, so those that create it can just click and buy.  Several companies are working hard on that, but two in particular seemed to be getting it, Digilabs and Rocket Life.  Here again, the difference seems to be the target audience ... a higher end book normally created by a professional with a little simpler and clean look (Digilabs), or more of a personal and fun style ... almost a scrapbook look (Rocket Life).  After picking your images, both automatically populate your book, but Rocket Life takes it to a new level, using image recognition and exif data to use related images on the same page or even a two page spread.  After you create the book with Rocket Life, you can easily click your way through variations, or you can get down and dirty and change everything about the book.  If you do this you can go either direction you want ... a cleaner more professional design all the way to a very personal scrapbook look.  Bottom line with either ... even the default creation is pretty good, and increases the likelihood of some one just clicking the buy button.

LowePro Fastpack

I stopped at the LowePro booth for a look at some new camera bags.  I have several LowePro bags, and to be honest I’ve still never found what I think is a perfect bag.  Last year on a trip to Japan, I used a LowePro roller bag to carry my gear onto the plane, but then used a LowePro Slingshot 300 to carry the gear around.  I like everything about the slingshot  - except that all of the weight was on a single shoulder strap.  Unless you clipped the waist band, the bag would slide sideways and get very heavy very fast.  Why couldn’t they just make the bag a backpack?

Either they have been getting this complaint from others, or someone just got a little creative, because basically that’s what they have done with the new Fastpack series of backpacks.  Four different sizes of dual strap backpacks, all of which allow you to swing bag round to the front using just the left shoulder strap, and remove the camera with attached lens from the side of the bag.  The two larger models are designed to carry a laptop as well, either a 15” or 17”.  This may not be the perfect bag, but since I liked nearly every thing about the Slingshot 300 except the single strap design, it may be the closest thing I’ve found so far.

HP, Epson, and Canon

I took some time to examine closely output from the current printers in each of their booths as well as at the DIMA Shootout display.  Not much to learn from this, since they aren’t identical images and both Epson and Canon DIMA Shootout prints were produced by rips.  I also think the entire concept of the shootout is pretty flawed, since it rates 9 different categories of quality and then averages them ... which doesn’t work because some of the categories are far more important to output quality than others.

What I did notice was the 11880 output was spectacular ... and pretty much exclusively people.  Not that Canon’s prints, including flesh wasn’t great, but to be honest the Epson prints were really incredible.  Of course, when you have portraits by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders taken using an 8x10 view camera, and prints probably produced by Nash Editions - well, you have to see the quality in these prints in person to appreciate how incredible they are. It’s unfortunate that HP’s marketing hype including the “benefit” of onboard color management has allowed them more success than they probably deserve, since this success has them under an illusion that the z3100 really competes with Epson and Canon.  Just because people buy it doesn’t make it as good, and they really need to improve their screening algorithms, and perhaps their inks.  Despite primaries, on high gamut papers the HP can’t beat either Epson or Canon.  Great prints, but definitely lagging behind the other two.

Digicams

As usual, there were a few hundred new consumer cameras. Even General Electric was there again in a huge exhibit, showing off their line of consumer digicams.  I’ve never even seen one of these in a store, so I’m not sure where they are going, but it seems everyone is making a camera, including a bunch of companies I’ve never heard of.

Seems like everyone is trying to make them smaller, faster, and smarter.  The sensor gets smaller with more pixels crammed on it so they can brag about now many megapixels the camera has ... which begs the question regarding image quality ... is it getting worse despite more resolution?  The big buzz this year seemed to be image recognition technology ... face detection, blink detection, and you guessed it, smile detection.  So you push the button and hold it down, and once your subject decides to smile the camera takes the picture.  I’m not sure that’s a good thing, since many great snapshots aren’t of smiles, and rarely is the first smile you get for a snapshot the one you want ... the real smile is after your subject cracks a face trying to be funny, then smile at themselves afterwards.  But let’s keep trying to take the photographer out of photography ...

camcorders

I’ve decided to invest in a new HD camcorder.  I have one of the first, a JVC that has great picture quality but is a little large to haul around.  The trend over the past few years is alternate storage options such as on board hard drives or direct to DVD recording, as well as somewhat decent still camera capabilities, upwards of 6mp.  I looked at both Sony and Canon, but decided I needed to research things a little more (such as which one plays nicely with my Mac), so I moved on to other things.  I’ll write up an article once I buy one and use it for a while.

Paper

I really wanted to examine the different papers being offered recently, such as the baryta’s, but found myself out of time.  I did get a chance to look closely at Hahnemuhle FineArt Baryta 325 and Epson Exhibition Fiber which I have already used and written about. Since the images aren’t the same, I can’t compare overall quality, but from a surface texture and appearance standpoint, the Epson is far better in my option.

Well that’s it ... another PMA bites the dust.