The Gates Open...

[LRY]

John, Paul, and Ringo... No, wait, that's not my name. Anyway, the three of us arrived here to capture the mob scene at the start of PMA today. It really isn't as bad (crowded) as it looks, and the crowd is just eager to see the new products and meet with all the reps, etc.

Our coverage of PMA 2007 will roughly follow John's schedule of meetings. While we will eventually get to all the interesting spots, the main meetings are as follows. Here's an opening shot (more later) and we'll have some video too.



So, we've got:



Thursday: Kodak, Panasonic, GE, and Fuji

Friday: Canon, Sony, Leica, Pentax

Saturday: Nikon, Olympus



So far this year's big buzz is Face Detection. Everyone who's anyone has it and it makes you a believer in industrial espionage (kidding). But everyone does have it and as Paul and I were observing, it may be sort of gimicky but it is kinda fun watching the faces get "detected" by the moving green box that outlines a face.


In fact, Paul was walking across the floor of another trade show just a couple weeks ago and as he looked up at a live-view screen, he saw that the face detection in the overhead camera did a brilliant job of detecting his bald spot! (He gave me permission to tell this story.)


Anyway, it is fun. Several of my friends or their wives have these new cameras and the enthusiasm is unanimous.


Of course, we have image stabilization everywhere, and intelligent ISO adjustment (finally, but it's being marketed as image stabilization so beware the potentially misleading messages).



All right, more soon!

Larry