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PDN PhotoPlus Expo 2009 Coverage

By Matt J. Weiss, October 25, 2009 @ 04:05 AM (EST)

The rain did not stop the crowds from coming to the 2009 PDN PhotoPlus Expo. Located close to the DivePhotoGuide offices at New York City’s Jacob Javitz Center, I joined the crowds to check out the show and play with latest toys. It's nearly impossible to give you complete coverage of the enormous show, so I tried to pick out what would be most interesting to underwater photographers.

The Javitz Center itself is a pretty cool building with a huge showroom. That said, the show was amazingly crowded, making it hard to even move at times.

2009 PhotoPlus Expo at the Javitz Center

I should point out that there were no dedicated underwater photography booths at the show. In fact, there were only three booths that had any housings and nothing was very new. We will have to wait for the upcoming DEMA show to see the hot new underwater photo products

The show did cover everything else you need and want as a photographer, no matter what you like to shoot. Canon, Nikon and Sony had the largest booths and also had the three hottest products—their new DSLR cameras. While the Nikon D3S, Canon EOS ID Mark IV and Sony Alpha A850 got a lot of the attention there were plenty of products to check out, from printers to camera straps.

It’s tough to get across just how intense the expo is, so I put together this 2-minute montage of short clips that I shot with my D90. Please excuse the music, I couldn’t resist. You’ll notice the lack of underwater oriented products, but being surrounded by passionate photographers and a room full of photo related products is something unique to this show that you can’t get at a dive expo.

There were also a few glaring absences from the show. Adobe was not there, so there was no way to inquire about the Lightroom 3 beta software that they just announced. Also, there were rumors that Apple was going to announce Aperture 3.0 at PhotoPlus, but they didn’t even have a booth. Some pretty major names in the camera industry, like Panasonic, Fujifilm and Samsung (I kind of wanted to see that Dual View camera with an LCD on the front that Samsung just put out) were absent from the show.

The Big Guns-DSLR Cameras

The Nikon “booth” (these booths are more like rooms, complete with theaters, image galleries, and a complete showroom of products) was huge and constantly crowded with photographers eager to get their hands on the D3S.

Interactive display of telephoto lenses at the Nikon "booth"

The D3S has a full frame, 12.1 megapixel sensor and is also able to capture 720p video at 24 frames per second. Nikon finally added video to their flagship DSLR, well after Canon, and it’s still only 720p at 24 frames per second. This is a race that Nikon can’t compete in as long as Sony continues to make sensors for them. Sony won’t give Nikon the technology before they implement it themselves. Aside from video, the D3S also boasts expanded ISO equivalent settings that go up to an absolutely absurd 102,400 ISO.

Canon had a huge presence at the show, and for good reason—they got to show off what might be the hottest camera out right now, the 1D Mark IV. The 1D Mark IV features a 16.1 megapixel, full frame sensor and a new, very much improved, autofocusing system. It also shoots 10 frames per second, which was a feature I fully enjoyed playing around with. Of course, the Mark IV can also take HD video at up to 1080p at 24 or 30 frames per second. Needless to say the Canon EOS ID Mark IV was a highlight of the show.

A happy Canon user gets to try out the Mark IV

Canon was also drawing crowds with its 7D, a lower end model. They had some hooked up with third party video accessories like viewfinders that had most of the crowd pretty giddy.

Canon 7D With Video Viewfinder

I also had to check out the Sony booth. Recently Sony has put out some pretty impressive full frame DSLR cameras. The Sony Alpha A850 was on display, as well as the Alpha A900, which was released a little earlier this year. They both have full frame, 24.6 megapixel sensors and the A900 is the first full framer to also feature in-camera image stabilization. The price tags on the A900 and A850 bodies are $2700 and $2000 dollars respectively. A full frame camera for 2 g’s is amazing.

The Sony Alpha A900

Sony was not a player in the SLR game until they bought Konica Minolta’s camera business in 2005. I guess most housing manufacturers figured that underwater photographers would not switch to Sony, so they never really made housings for the Sony SLRs. BS Kinetics, though, has a nice light weight housing for some Sony SLRs and I hope others will follow suit. Visiting the Sony booth made me wish they had a bigger presence in the underwater world. With so many people buying digital cameras for the first time, its time for Sony to get some underwater love.

I think the groundbreaking video trend has overshadowed another trend in DSLR market, which is the end of the Great Megapixel Race. Representatives were busy explaining to consumers why their camera sensors were not showing huge improvements in megapixels. Not trying to cram in all those megapixels into a sensor has its benefits, and its nice to see manufactures taking advantage of it.

Compact Cameras-More Than Just Point and Shoots

Compact cameras were pretty overshadowed by the bigger models at the show, but 2009 has given us a new twist on compact cameras that focus on quality sensors and lenses. The trend started with the Sigma DP1 and Sigma, despite being known for their lenses, is still very much a competitor in the new compact camera market. They had their DP2 on display which features a unique Foveon sensor and a 41 mm lens with a maximum aperture of 2.8.

Sigma has competition now with the addition of the Panasonic/Olympus four-thirds format. Olympus, who had one of the biggest booths, featured their E-P1, an interchangeable lens, 12.2-megapixel camera. We are starting to see SLR like quality in point and shoot like sizes. However, we still have not seen any housings for these cameras. There was no word from Olympus on whether they had any intention of releasing a housing for the EP-1, but I think there is a future for the micro four-thirds format in the underwater market.

The Other Stuff

Photography these days is more than just camreras. You need a whole bunch of other gadgets and PhotoPlus had no shortage of accessories.

Printing

A lot of times we just shoot and put our photos up on the web, but who doesn’t love a great print? PhotoPlus had a wide range of printers from a number of companies.

The biggest guy there was the Canon IP F8100. This is a top of the line printer that costs over four grand. The large format printer drew a lot of attention from envious attendees.

A more practical home printer that drew some big crowds was the Epson Stylus Photo R2880. Priced at $799.00 it’s one of the cheaper professional printers.

Storage

Storage is major part of most digital photographers lives. PhotoPlus had no shortage of storage solutions on display.

The Drobo is a very popular system for backing up photos as its automated and reliable. I had actually never seen one before so it was cool to check out.

The Drobo Display

Lacie had a sleek new hard drive on display, the Lacie Starck. The Starck is designed by Phillippe Starck and features a front panel that has a customizable touch-sensitive surface, which lets you open up an application by simply touching it.

I saw products from WiebieTech at the show for the first time and they had some interesting storage solutions for underwater photographers. I checked out the RTX 400-QR that has fire wire 400 and 800 ports as well as USB 2.0 and eSATA. It can hold up to 4 terabytes of storage at one time but you can swap drives. I am looking forward to seeing their ToughTech Mini-QR which is a portable drive that has easy-release removable 2.5” drive sleds and RAID 1 mirroring to keep files safe. A nice option for long trips in challenging conditions.

Other Stuff

I got this great camera strap in a press kit goodie bag called the California Sunbounce Sun-Sniper. The reason I liked it so much was that it attaches to the camera by screwing into the tripod mount. I hate having to tie on those standard straps every time I take my camera out of the housing and on a topside excursion. The Sun-Sniper makes this hassle free, and it’s more comfortable too. I can usually recognize an underwater photographer on land because they are the ones walking around without a camera strap, but this need not be the case!

AquaTech had the only camera housing at the show I had not seen before. These housings are not really dive housings as they only go down to 10 meters, but they are splash proof housings for surfing or boat photography or the shallow dive. They look very well made and are certainly sleek. Great to see a housing I haven't seen before!

People lined up at the Kodak booth to get free film. Who said film was dead? This was fun to see.

Free film at the Kodak booth at PhotoPlus

At all times you are surronded by stunning images and seminars led by photographers who can help you create stunning images.

HDR panorama shot and printed with Canon products. Pretty intense.

Sony had seminars all day in their booth.

An underwater photo!

All in all PhotoPlus was a great show for any photographer. Even though at times underwater photographers would rather talk about nudibranchs and seahorses than gigabytes or color correction I think we all have an inner techie in us. The dive shows are great for seeing the stuff specific to underwater photography, but PhotoPlus is really a photo heaven, appealing to anyone with slightest interest in capturing images.

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