I am at CES and here is a report from the show floor today.

Pansonic showing the GH-3, of course. One Panasonic person said the GH-3 video is now as good Vitaliy's hacks :)

Panasonic also showing a 4K video camera prototype.

Sigma continues to show their 19 and 30mm micro four thirds lenses and there was a hint that there may be a future 50mm micro four thirds lens from them.

I did not yet get to the Olympus booth, nor JVC. Pentax had a corner of the Ricoh booth.

Lots of Wi-Fi capable cameras - Nikon has a $60 adapter that adds Wi-Fi to many cameras in their line up. Interfaces to iPhone and Android phones for complete remote control and access.

Nikon, Polaroid and Samsung showed cameras running Android OS. I see these as market experiments to see what happens. Adding a public OS to the camera means software developers can add capabilities and access anything the Android OS and SDK make available. As to battery life, the general sense is that cameras eat batteries, period. Adding Android doesn't make that much of a difference - the camera itself eats up too much power. One vendor said their Android camera gets about 150 shots per battery charge.

Everyone is showing 4k HDTV are, as some call it, Ultra TV or similar names. 4k has four times the resolution of today's HDTV.

As I understand it there will be - but is not yet - a 4k Bluray standard. For the time being, there is no 4k content available for anyone, but the show demonstrations are very sharp, well shot imagery.

For most consumers, in a typical home, with a typical screen size, and with typical eyesight, might not really notice the difference between 2k and 4k. Some of us may notice because we care about such things, but the 4k marketing message was not yet clear to me other than "it really is way cool".

Samsung, and presumably others, were showing 4k 3D and here, the 4k did show its capabilities. 3D likes detail, and more resolution also enables some very clean, narrow parallax images that would not be possible with less pixels. But the market demand for 3D is still muddled although is growing slowly.

Tomorrow I hope to find Olympus and some other camera vendors, plus visit some of the small international vendors who have show interesting technologies before we see them from the big vendors.

One area I follow is the consumer market for 3D cameras. As you may know, the week before Christmas, B&H Photo and Walmart.com both showed the Fujifilm W3 as discontinued. Amazon and B&H are both running half price sales on the Toshiba Z100 consumer 3D camcorder, and the Lumix 3D1 is no longer carried by Amazon (itself) and is now available only from 3rd party vendors.

Here's what I picked up from reputable people connected with the companies. Fujifilm W3 sales have fallen off and they are not now being manufactured but will continue to ship from inventory for the foreseeable future. If demand resumes, they will make more.

Sony confirmed that the Bloggie 3D camera has been discontinued, but they have continued to evolve the Sony TD10 into the TD20 into the TD30 3D video camcorder (uniquely records dual 1920x1080p streams).

Toshiba was not showing any cameras at all at this year's CES and no one knew anything about the Toshiba Z100.

And then Samsung introduced the first single lens 3D camera.

My thoughts are that there was a mismatch between low end consumer 3D cameras and the target customer. The consumers likely to pursue 3D may be the higher end purchaser looking for great solutions, not necessarily lowest price.

Samsung is going after this higher end market with a interchangeable lens camera and their first 3D lens, priced more like a GH-2 and m43 lenses. The NX300 is a higher end, more sophisticated customer, buying an APS-C sized sensor. The 3D lens is also an f/1.8 2D lens that is reported to be very high quality as a 2D lens. If this lens sells well, they are likely to introduce other 2D/3D lenses. They 3D results out of this lens, from the demo, are quite good.

First 3 photos attached Panasonic illustration of the Canon solution, big camera, big lens, huge backpack versus the m43ds solution, with modest camera, small lenses, small backpack. They should do more comparisons like this. I like small.

2nd photo shows the m43 lens line up from all vendors. Sorry I didn't get these two rotated to vertical.

3rd photo shows the 300mm telephoto form Kenko Tokina. This is a telescope like design, which uses a couple of internal mirrors to increase the lens length.

More photos

1st photo. More of the insides of the GH-3. Because I was shooting with a GH-2, the sales rep removed the glass shield for this photo opportunity. He said he likes people shooting with the Lumix cameras.

2nd photo - Canon's Powershot line. They introduced the Powershot N which is a small square camera. Definitely a rethinking of the lower end camera line. All camera companies are trying to figure out what to do about smart phone cameras. The N camera is square (not rectangular like most cameras), very thin. You take photos and can apply Instagram like filters to the photo (and in my view, ruin perfectly good photos, but what do I know about Instagram) and then has Wi-Fi connectivity so that you can work with your smart phone to upload to sharing sites.

3rd photo - a map of the Canon booth. They sprawl so much they have their own map. Big like their cameras. Oops, my bias is showing.

Vitaliy, would you like these on a different thread or is this a good one for these updates?

Ed

Not as close as I wished. I will try to swing by the Panasonic booth again in the next couple of days and use a different lens to get closer. I just had the kit 14-42 on the camera while shooting these but I have other lenses with me.

http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/5724/corning-usb-optical-cables#Item_1

Polaroid announced a unique Android-based camera, whose sensor is built in to the lens. This has led to some confusion that I can clear up.

They will be shipping in the spring, a micro four thirds adapter. The adapter itself also includes a sensor but can then work with any m43 lens. In other words, the camera body does not have a sensor - its in the kit lens, or in the adapters.

Adapters for other lenses are expected a short time later. Pricing is suggested to be surprisingly affordable. Each adapter will have a sensor built in but many different lenses can be used with the adapter. The m43 adapter is expected in April, and a second lens adapter for another lens line will also likely be out in the spring.

This is a different kind of camera on many levels. Android-based, hope to see 3rd party apps developed for the camera features. Emphasize image sharing capabilities (FB, Twitter, etc).

Some closer in photos of the GH-3 exploded view and a GH-3 magnesium alloy shell.

The lst photo is the opposite side of the circuit board. It was hard to get a view of it so the photo is not great.

The Sony TD30V replaces the TD20. Per the rep and my estimate, the TD30 returns to the 30mm stereobase separation. Price is lowered to US$999.95. Main changes are external SD card only now, no more internal memory for that. And the parallax adjustment has moved on to a menu item - its pretty straight forward user interface - provides both auto alignment and manual adjustment of parallax.

In 3D, the lens is as wide as 33mm full frame equivalent and in 2D its 29mm equivalent.

Fujifilm's new X20 is basically a compact version of the X Pro 1 and a 2x faster processor. It will sell for US $599. This camera features Fujifilm's own EXTRANS sensor technology. Rather than a Bayer pattern and the problems that causes with moire or fuzziness caused by the optical low pass filters, this sensor uses a random pattern sensor (the idea is to emulate film). This eliminates the need for an optical low pass filter, which means a sharper image and no moire.

Also, Olympus, like last year, does not have a public show booth but is only having private meetings in the meeting rooms area.

Thank you, @edwardm - good shit.

We spoke with LG Display (the pseudo-independent Korean display maker) here at CES and the company's reps tell us that all LCD makers are looking to move their business models on from cheap mass production to higher-margin, premium offerings. Having been burned by the costs of tooling up large factories for extremely price-sensitive screens, guys like LGD are now looking to innovate and secure their future viability by selling fewer, but more profitable displays.

Via: TheVerge

CES 2013 main idea in one paragraph.