I went down to Javits yesterday to go to photoexpo for the first time. It was a “working” trip for the forum and gear reviews basically, but a lot of fun. I met up with 4 of the NSOP guys as well and we hit up the show from 10am until 3pm, then 4 of us walked around NYC for the rest of the evening shooting for fun. It was a great trip and I saw some fun/cool new things including:
- tamron’s 70-300
- spyder holsters, and learned they CAN work with an L-bracket
- lowepro’s SF vest which will work with TT’s modular components.
- I got to talk to the TT guys and show off my sling-o-matic converted to a backpack (they seemed very interested)
- free moo cards (I was 90 of 100, the boys grabbed 91~94 as well!!!).
- free canvas on demand 16×20
- $50 off an adorama photobook
- sony knows how to setup a booth
- canon knows prints sell cameras
- nikon has pretty ladies on stage for people to shoot
- sigma likes to let you play with their lenses
- sirui makes some very interesting tripods
- induro and benro are imported by the same parent company, it’s basically twist locks (induro) -vs- flips (benro).
- the 645D is lighter than I thought, and once they get a wide lens things will get interesting in the high end 35mm landscape arena…
- zeiss makes great lenses but are REALLY snobbish when it comes to IQ (bagging on canon and nikon’s great glass). Guess what guys, an in focus image has much better IQ than an out of focus image, FWIW. Your lenses ARE sexy as hell, but don’t be so cocky about it.
- olypmpus has a rad new mft body up it’s sleeve. It’s pictured below and going to hit stores in Q1 2011. I asked point blank if it was MFT and they didn’t deny it and smirked a bit. It’s also way to big to be anything but and the lens is also quite big (to not be MFT). It’s a lot smaller and thinner than a MFT body with interchangeable lenses so they might have a real winner there (-vs- the X1, X100 and NEX5 size wise).
I think that’s about it.
“Sigma likes to let you play with their lenses”: I liked that, too, given that Canon does not. Canon’s policy (to avoid theft) is to have you use their lenses on THEIR cameras only… but the 5D Mk2 I tried was faulty! The guy there thought the lens was the problem, put it on my body… all good. Can give quite a bad first impression if a novice picks up a camera from their booth… half an hour later the faulty body was still there, very strange quality control on their part. Glad you had fun, I was like a kid at the candy store the first time I went to PhotoPlus.
pretty sure there were 4 of us who walked around after…
Eric, yeah, 4 and me at first, so when I subtracted one I went to 3 but worded it so I was in the group. I R bad at math… lol.
Jerome, yeah, exactly. I didn’t even bother with canon’s or nikon’s booths honestly. I know the lines well enough and because they were setup with their bodies it wasn’t worth it.