Sunday, September 26, 2010

Sunday gear round-up 9/26/2010


*Aquatech has a new underwater housing for DSLR’s, the CO-7. This is a hard-shell case, so each camera model requires a specific housing. More for snorkeling than scuba, the housing is designed for depths to 33 feet. It should be available for approximately $1,900 on-line.

*Pentax showed a new Model 645D at Photokina in Cologne, Germany. The body has a 40-megapixwl sensor and will accept all previous 645 lenses from Pentax. New lenses with automatic correction in Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom are also planned. Pentax has some heavy competition in this medium-format digital camera category and is getting a late start compared to Hasselblad, Leaf/Mamiya, Leica and the full-frame 35mm digital bodies from Leica, Canon and Nikon.

*Sigma has a new Foveon-sensored SD1 camera body with APS-sized sensor. The sensor is rated for just over 15-megapixels. Sigma claims an improved sensor but people have tended to either really like or really not like the “look” of images made by the Foveon sensor.

*Panasonic has a lens fitting its Micro Four Thirds format cameras that produces stereo images that can be made into 3-D photographs.

*Part of Canon’s upgrade to its telephoto lens line is a smooth powered focusing option to take fuller advantage of the video capabilities of most the company’s current DSLR camera bodies. The long focal-length lenses will also be slightly smaller and significantly lighter in weight. Canon is also introducing a super-wide fisheye zoom lens that will be only the second of its type(Tokina makes the first).

*Fujifilm has a new dual-lens 3-D compact digital camera, the FinePix Real 3D W3.


It will be a very interesting few years ahead of us as we see just how popular 3-D imaging becomes with the general public. I can understand its popularity in the movie theaters, impressed with the 3-D effect but still annoyed by the distorting, low-quality glasses. Will 3-D televisions quickly become a must-have item the way large flat-panel televisions did or will it take a while to catch on? Are stereo-pairs of 3-D photographs really going to become mainstream for amateur and/or professional photography? I want to know now!

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