With most of the major camera manufacturers making their product announcements well in advance of Photokina 2006, the show has lost some of what could be called it’s dynamic atmosphere. That is not to say that the show is not worth visiting but more a reflection on how news is reported in this electronic day and age.
With three extra halls this year, there was even less chance of getting around to see everything inside a day, and two days would still be a push! Roughly split down into sections containing different areas of interest, getting, for example, from lenses to Tripods meant a route march through several halls!
Invariably this meant passing stands with demonstrations and other attractions going on, diverting the attention down yet another avenue of presentations and displays, inevitably leading to the wrong staircase or escalator! Of the appointments I had made, I managed to be late for al but the first! However, no one seemed to mind, all being used to the chaos!
The most striking thing was the number of Chinese manufacturers that were displaying their wares under their own banners. Many have built up experience of the market by making gear for established western names and are now trying to get a foot in the door themselves. One of the most striking of these was a firm making tripods and monopods and going by the name of Benro. Their lines are remarkably similar to a well-known western make, and not one with a similar name either. The quality is extremely high and the prices, not surprisingly, considerably lower. They even have a UK distributor in Photopal and claim to have 40% of the far eastern tripod market already, we can look forward to hearing more about them in the future.
There was almost an entire hall taken up by the suppliers and manufacturers of memory cards and all of the big names we present.
Kingston Technologies were majoring on mini SD capacities for mobile devices and promoting the increase in write speeds of their Compact Flash Ultimate cards from 100x to 133x. They are also package image recovery software with their 2GB and 4GB cards and introducing an 8GB card.
Sandisk were showing their new 16GB ultra CF cards but admitted that they would not be available until the New Year.
Lexar were promoting their tenth anniversary in the memory card game and pointing out the advantages in scale that their takeover by Micron Corp would bring. Already producing high capacity cards with 133x read and write speeds, they were promoting their stacking system of high speed card readers now being optionally packaged with the high capacity cards.
Trying to get them all to put their products up against each other for a comparative test was not so fruitful though!
The lens manufacturers each had their latest gem on show with Tamron displaying the almost 14x zoom 18-250mm DiII and Sigma showing off their 18-200mm lens fitted with Optical Stabilisation, only the second of their lenses to carry this system.
There was plenty of other things to see, including many photographers favourite subject, birds of prey being displayed on the outdoor piazza, photography sessions with fast cars, bikes and beautiful ladies under different manufacturers lighting systems and Canon’s non stop fashion parade. (Well it seemed to be non-stop, every time we passed!)
Was it worth the ferry trip and nearly 500 miles of driving, some of which was in the heaviest rain I’ve ever driven through? Well yes, but if you plan on going next time, allow a couple of days at least.
