As every gamer knows E3 and every broadcaster knows IBC, every photographer should know Photokina. It is the world's largest fair for photographic and imaging related topics. Held every 2 years in the Messe in Cologne, it attracts visitors from all over the world. All major vendors are present and they often take the opportunity to introduce new devices. The biggest advantage of Photokina is you can actually try all kinds of lenses and equipment, they're not just mounted on a stand to just look at.
Cologne is only a 2,5 hours drive from Ghent, so Friday the 24th of december, we (Jos, Olivier, Werner and I) decided to pay it a visit. We all got up really early to be ahead of traffic and to maximize our Photokina experience.
Once arrived and parked, we could took the free (!) shuttle bus from the parking lot to the fair. This is really an example for us Belgians!
On the fair itself we took the opportunity to test all different types of gear and cameras:
We saw a prototype of the new PocketWizard Wireless Flash Trigger.
The Flash triggers come into different flavors: you have the Flex TTL5 Transceiver, and the MiniTT1, which is only a transmitter.
Pocketwizard is kind of the de-facto standard for wireless flash triggers. But until a short time ago, wireless triggering with TTL functionality enabled was fairly impossible. This due to the fact that TTL communication-standards and light-measuring methods are pretty closed source. Because of this the people at PocketWizard had to reverse engineer all the protocols by themselves. They managed to do it for Canon a few months ago. Apparently ,the Nikon system is a bit more complex. But at Photokina they could already present a prototype which should be final in a few months. We couldn't test it though, so we had to take the salesguy's word for it. But we still managed to take some pictures:
As Jos is a Canon Shooter, we also payed a visit to the Canon booth. Canon gave the possibility to test a wide range of lenses on their stand. The light on the stand was really nice and they had some really cool Origami artwork which was ideal to take some test shots. As I still own a Nikon D80, the canon DSLR camera's were not my piece of cake. But I do was interested in the compact camera range of Canon. This is something where Nikon, in my opinion, really lacks some good camera's (although I didn't test their most recent models). The PowerShot G12 is a very nice camera! It features a very good High Iso Performance, and the sharpness and bokeh were also pretty amazing for such a small camera.
The Nikon Stand was a tad smaller, but you still had the chance to test most of their recent camera's. For us it was ideal to test the Nikon flagships like the D3s and the D3x. And I have to say, I was amazed! The D3s has a maximum ISO value of 12.800 (102,400 when boosted) and it really shows! The amount of noise for high ISO values is extremely low! We could also test the D700 which has some pretty nice ISO ratings as well but not as good as the D3s. I would have liked to test the new D7000, which Nikon announced at the Photokina fair, but there was a very large queue of people that wanted to do the same and so we skipped it. One minor disappointment was the fact that we couldn't test the new 85mm 1.4. It was available but behind glass.
Next to that we could also test the Leica M9. The M9 is one of the most compact Full Frame camera's on the market. It can output a 18 MP DNG Raw file but it still works with a rangefinder. It also doesn't have autofocus, you have to focus manually by moving a small square area in your viewfinder over the representing area in the entire viewfinder. People say that once you get away with the focussing mechanism it can work really fast, but on Photokina I didn't notice any of this. I found it very hard to focus correctly especially when the background is messy.
All in all, it was an extremely interesting day! Allthough I also have some negative remarks on Photokina: A lot of people at the stands don't speak English at all, with the International reputation of the Fair, I think that is a must!
Furthermore, I found the lack of a floorplan which listed all the exhibitors a disappointment. At the entrance of each hall there was an overview, but when you didn't knew in which hall a certain exhibitor was, it wasn't very easy to find them.
