Day 2 at Focus - in pictures

25th February - 2002
By Ian Burley

There hasn’t been any let up in the poor weather in and around Birmingham, but this failed to stem the tide of visitors to the NEC today. Here’s our second illustrated report from Focus on Imaging, starting with the return of Konica to the digital centre-stage:

Don’t be fooled by the APS logo and rolls of film; above is the new 4 megapixel Digital Revio KD-400Z announced today both here and in Florida at the PMA show. Supplementing Konica’s existing 3MP own-brand badged version of the Kyocera Finecam S3, the new KD-400Z has a 3x optical Hexanon f/3.4-4 zoom lens, movie clip mode with sound and the unique compatibility combination of being able to take both Sony Memory Stick and SD/MMC memory cards. All this is in a tiny package reminiscent of Canon’s Digital Ixus range. We’re promised a price of under £400 when the KD-400Z ships early in the summer.

One of the more striking stands features product demonstrators for Agfa’s kiosk station mini labs, already being trialled at some selected Safeway supermarkets. These photo input stations can deal with practically any digital medium and allow you to choose the size and type of print required via a touch screen interface. Once selected, the print is output to the mini lab, which could be some distance from the kiosk.

We were able to have a hands-on session with Nikon’s new £299 CoolPix 2500 swivel camera (click here), modelled here by What Digital Camera magazine’s deputy editor, Gavin Stoker. The CP 2500 certainly adds a new dimension to the 2 megapixel ‘fun camera’ sector, just like Minolta’s Dimage X, below:

It’s easy to describe on paper just how small the 2MP £399 Dimage X (click here) is, but seeing it in real live remains a marvel. It’s just like a mini-disc music player, thanks to its ‘folded’ periscope-style lens that never needs to protrude, even when zooming.

All of Canon’s newly announced models, bar the black G2 kit (click here), were spied at the Canon stand. Above you can see (left front) the £189 1.3MP PowerShot A100 (click here), the PowerShot A30 and A40 (click here) and the new 6MP EOS-D30 SLR (click here).

Finally, for today, I had a look at Gretag’s Masterflex D-series digital mini lab. Paul, on the left, was able to place a wad of 5x7 prints in my hands from my camera’s compact flash card in barely five minutes from start to finish. Admittedly I was using a 5MP Olympus E-20, but even so, the quality deliverable from the latest digital mini labs is exceptional, with no obviously detectable digital give-aways in the prints. The Gretag unit above uses a DMD or digital micromirror device to project the high resolution digital image onto conventional silver halide wet process colour paper.

We’ll have even more news from the show tomorrow.

www.focus-on-imaging.co.uk

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