PHOTOPLUS Expo 2001 Attendance About the Same as Last Year

The PHOTOPLUS Expo 2001 came to a close on Sunday in New York City. The show's promoters were happy to report that this year's attendance was about the same as last year's - and that's good news. After the Sept 11 tragedy in NYC the convention attendance for most events held in the "Big Apple" have been way down so the PhotoPlus folks are extremely happy that their event was so well attended. There were about 200 vendors at the show this year all doing their best to "wow" the hordes of pro photographers and photography enthusiasts. Of course digital was the main theme being pushed by most of the major manufacturers.

Nikon was showing their professional D1X and D1H digital SLRs as well as the soon to be released Coolpix 5000 prosumer camera.

Fujifilm in an attempt to lure studio photographers into the digital realm was offering a free GX680III pro camera and a Power Mac G4 computer to those who bought one of the company's Luma pro digital camera backs. The Luma back works with top pro studio cameras like the Fujifilm and Hasselblad models and costs about ,000. For that you get a 3.6 x 2.4 cm CCD array with 2048 x 3072 resolution, 14 bits of image data per color and 12 F-stops of dynamic range. If you didn't want the camera and computer you could opt for a Fujifilm Pictography 3500 Digital Printer. Fuji says that the Luma II digital back is going to be available in 2002 with an 11-megapixel CCD.

Kodak was showing their Professional DCS Pro Back Plus, a 16-megapixel back that was engineered to fit a wider range of medium-format cameras. Kodak claims it will now fit any medium-format camera with an electronic shutter. The new Pro DCS Back Plus carries a price tag of ,000. Where most of the pro digital camera backs require you to be tethered to a computer, the Pro DCS Back Plus has two card slots that can hold up to 2GB (using Microdrives) of image data which relates to about 100 pictures. And speaking of computer support, the Kodak pro back only supports the Apple Mac and is lacking OS X support at the moment. Kodak also announced their DCS Custom Looks Profiles for the DCS Pro Back and the newer DCS Pro Back Plus. There are ten new profiles that let the digital backs emulate popular film and lens tonal values such as: Portrait Hi Color Hold, High Contrast, B&W Normal, Wratten #8, Wratten #25, Sepia 1 and Sepia 2. This collection is available now for .

Olympus was demonstrating its new and tiny 4-megapixel D-40 Zoom - the world's smallest 4-megapixel digital camera. The 3.4 x 2.7 x 1.7 inch camera sports a 2.8x optical zoom, noise reduction, USB and a host of other features for a suggested retail of . Olympus was also showing their newly updated prosumer digital SLR, the 5-megapixel E-20N with its 4x optical zoom and the first camera to use a dual mode CCD imager. In Interlaced mode the E-20N captures the maximum amount of image detail, in Progressive mode it lets users capture fast action scenes with shutter speeds up to 1/18,000 second. The new E-20N is equipped with dual card slots for CompactFlash Type II and SmartMedia and is now fully IBM Microdrive compatible. The E-20N is available now for .

Pentax Japan recently announced its plans to discontinue the full-frame digital SLR it showed at PMA 2001 earlier this year due to cost concerns. This is not surprising given the fierce competition we've already seen with the Nikon D1X and the soon to be released Canon EOS-1D digital SLRs. Pentax did show their new and ultra-small Optio 430 which is billed as the world's smallest 4-megapixel camera with a 3x optical zoom. Not much bigger than a deck of playing cards, the Optio 430 measures 3.6 x 2.3 x 1.2 inches and weighs a scant 7.2 ounces. Pentax is offering rebate on the Optio 330 which is identical to the Optio 430 except it has a 3-megapixel imager.