Phase One President and CEO Henrik Håkonsson told BJP that they are working on a “brand new camera design”. No further details were provided. Their current Phase One Mamiya 645 Camera version was introduced back in 2006 (AF version) and updated in 2009 (DF version). The real news here is the new Phase One Investment Protection Plan and they decided to spice it up a little.
Three weeks ago Think Tank Photo announced their latest sling bag line called Sling-O-Matic. Thanks to the nice people behind Think Tank, I was able to try (exclusively?) a pre-production version of their Sling-O-Matic 30 model:
The opening is on the side which provides quick and comfortable access while the bag is on your shoulder:
PDNguide (link is NSFW) spoke to Ned Bunnell (President of Pentax USA) during Photokina regarding the Pentax 645D release in the US :
“We’re going to start to bring the 645D into the States in late November or early December but that’s based on availability. We’re still fighting fairly significant back orders in Japan.”
The Pentax 645D will be shown at the PDN PhotoPlus Expo in New York in October. The US price will be $9999.99 for body only.
In addition to the Sony E-mount roadmap from yesterday, there is also a new Ricoh GXR roadmap. The big news here is that in 2011 Ricoh will also offer expansion units but the roadmap does not specify what mounts will be supported. Previous rumors already suggested MicroFourThirds module and even Leica M mount and Hasselblad mount prototypes were floating around few months ago.
You can see all currently available GXR products and prices on Amazon.
This is the latest Sony NEX (E-mount) lens roadmap till 2012:
The expected lenses for the next two years are:
At that point there is nothing really new to report from Photokina. Here are few links from day 5 of the show:
Kenko is best known for its photography equipment accessories and converters (they also produce camera lenses under the Tokina brand name). Kenko was suppose to display a prototype of their new digital camera with interchangeable lenses at Photokina, but the prototype… got lost (?)… so they only had few pictures to show:
credit: DC Watch
Specs after the break:
Plenoptic technology is developed by Adobe and it lets you select which part of the image you want to be in focus. A Plenoptic camera contains an array of microlenses between the front lens and the sensor and it captures a series of small images from different viewpoints that can later be extracted and manipulated by special software in order to reach a certain depth of field during postprocessing.
Todor Georgiev is one of the scientist from Adobe that worked on that project and on his website I even found a picture of the the first plenoptic camera on the market produced by the German company Raytrix:
Photokina news are slowly fading away as we approach the end of day 3 of the biggest photography show. Quick update on the latest:
