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December 21, 2007
[ GREAT EXPECTATIONS FOR 2008 ]
[Melbourne Zoo: Olympus E-3 with Zuiko 150mm f2 lens]
DPEXPERT WENT OFF TO THE ZOO last week to try out a new single lens reflex with a film-equivalent 300mm lens. The tigers – the parents and the three handsome adolescents – are extraordinarily photogenic. We came away with a memory card full of cats, apes and one emu having a bad hair day.
However, we were amazed by how many fellow gawkers were taking pictures with their telephones. Given that these devices have wide angle, fixed focal length, fixed aperture lenses they are not the ideal tool for the job.
We also wondered what the photographers intended to do with their snaps. But then we saw one woman taking a picture of her offspring sitting on the elephant statue and saying: “I’ll send this one to dad, right away.”
2008 could be the year when the ubiquitous telephone camera displaces the discrete unit. Last year Nokia was already boasting that it was the biggest camera maker in the world. The company said that it had sold about 140 million camera phones in 2006.
So what are people doing with their camera phones? Do they make prints from the image files? Glynn Lavender, retail operations manager at Camera House, says that almost no one prints from phones. Even though the latest have Bluetooth transmitters and the shop kiosks are fitted with receivers they hardly ever have customers making prints. Telephone photos are not becoming part of the national informal private archive.
2008 should see advances in telephone camera technology. We hope that this means better optics and not simply more pixels. 2 megapixels is more than enough for the tiny sensors built into phones – any more and the picture will be degraded, not improved.
2007 saw such activity in the SLR part of the business with new products from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus and Panasonic that we don’t expect anything startlingly new for 2008. However we do expect prices to drop. Pentax and Nikon have set new entry level benchmarks with their excellent K100D Super and the Nikon D40.
In compact cameras we are pessimistic. 2007 saw an outbreak of pixel madness that has resulted in some serious image degradation in the most expensive compacts. Now we have the paradox of the cheaper cameras being better buys than the most expensive. We have had to foreswear our own golden rule that you get what you pay for in digital cameras. Sometimes you don’t! What we would really like to see in the coming year is some maker with the courage to produce a compact with a decent sized sensor. Olympus and Panasonic are the obvious starters with their Four Thirds sensors that are smaller than those used by Canon, Nikon et al in their SLRs. A 10 megapixel Four Thirds sensor in a top quality compact would be a winner.
Finally, a correction to our review of the Kodak Easyshare 5300 multi function unit. It came to us with packets of Studio Gloss paper, which is really dimpled semi-gloss. We asked for true gloss and were sent more Studio Gloss. We made a reasonable assumption, but in fact there is a fine Kodak paper called Kodak Ultra High Gloss. Now you know what to ask for! Gloss doesn’t always mean gloss.
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Posted by terry at December 21, 2007 05:45 AM
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