Small gimbals and DJI

"I am still going through the hundreds photos and my notes taken during the Photokina, but my main impression from the show is that the photo-/video-industry is evolving very fast, being at the current moment on a verge of big changes. What will be the change, nobody would tell at the moment."

I have wrote that two years go after the Photokina 2012, but I have the similar reaction after spending last week at the Cologne Exhibition Center, Koelnmesse.

Time will tell, whether the mobile "smart" devices will became a preferred choice by majority of consumers as an audiovisual recording device, or perhaps cameras/camcorders will became themselves a kind of smart communication "connected" devices transmitting/receiving data to/from everywhere.

While during the previous Photokina the 3D-imaging was still a fashionable subject, nowadays there were almost no mentioning of it. The 4K video theme has replaced it. In fact, video features continue to spread out into the previously solely still-imaging devices. For example, for me it was interesting to see Leica S (Type 007) as a first Medium Format camera with 1080p HD-video scanning its entire MF-sensor.

I don't want to comment on the camera announcements, since the role of trade shows for announcing major new products isn't that important anymore.

Lenses, adapters, camera cages, lights, auxiliary accessories. These products traditionally dominate the Photokina in numbers and coverage.

The more and more companies are offering new high-quality fast lenses. Now we have got at least few really decent manual focus rectilinear wide-angle "cinema" lenses native to the Micro Four Thirds lens mount, such as Kowa Prominar 8.5mm f/2.8, SLR Magic HyperPrime Cine 10mm T2.1, Voigtländer Nokton 10.5mm f/0.95, and Tokina Cinema AT-X 11-16mm T3.0 Lens. All the above were available for testing and each look decent.

More and more lens adapters appear in the market that provide either electronic contacts between the lens and the camera or allow to control electronically the lens' aperture/focus. There were also a few lens adapters that optically reduce the focal length, or have built-in neutral density filter.

New LED lights are appearing, which provide either better color rendering, more power, adjustable beam angle, thinner in depth and/or lighter in weight. Some of lights allow remote control and/or have an option of master/slave channel settings to wirelessly control the brightness and/or color temperature.

There are new interesting products among the rigs, rails, cages, as well as other accessories. Modular and "smart" camera stabilization rigs have attracted a lot of attention, and some were selling like selling like hotcakes during the last two days of the Photokina. Overall, it appears that there are more non-camera related staff on Photokina than the actual photo-video equipment.

FujiFilm interviews

• http://www.bestmirrorlesscamerareviews.com/2014/09/25/photokina-2014-interview-with-product-manager-riccardo-scotti-of-fujifilm-italy/
• http://www.dpreview.com/articles/1289445414/photokina-2014-fujifilm-interview-over-the-past-few-months-i-ve-been-getting-more-confident

Photokina Experience

Rushing back from Portugal on a late Sunday evening plane back to England to catch the next flight from Gatwick to Cologne in the early hours of the following morning is not fun. :-) Especially if you’re exhausted and you’ve just had to depart a gloriously relaxing apartment with a dreamlike infinity pool, drinks, great food, music, family and friends. But so it had to be – and I’d promised Vitaliy Kiselev from Personal-View.com and Mark Baber from Panasonic UK that I’d attend Photokina 2014.

So 10am GMT+1 time I’ve landed in the unknown. I’ve never been to Cologne before but I was expecting a grey newly built city with not much to do. How wrong I was - but more on that later. Getting the train to Central Station from the airport seemed simple enough and it didn’t cost the earth – British Rail take note! Efficient check-in protocols meant that I couldn’t check into the Seritas hotel at 11am so I departed in a daze carrying all my spare clothing and extra shit that I’d brought along – basically the dirty clothes from my Portugese break. So it was off to the exhibition with a fully loaded suitcase.

I took the one stop S11 rail journey over the river to the exhibition entrance, confident that I could walk easily and leisurely to the North entrance, thinking it can’t be that far. Wrong again. This place was huge. I found myself walking all the way round onto a side road and a good mile stroll weighed down by my baggage. I think I must’ve looked like someone from The Walking Dead – tired with bags under my eyes and stumbling along trying to find my destination – the Press Office.

Eventually I located Photokina North – the Press Office – thru the doors and into a vast hall with lots of escalators. I was greeted by a beautiful woman dressed in green and ushered up the right-side escalator to the registration office. Struggling to find my piece of ‘Press accreditation’ paper (provided by Vitaliy) I brought up and pushed the crumpled paper into the hands of one of the Press delegates (another beautiful girl – where do they find them?!) and announced myself: “Nick Driftwood from Personal-View” Deywood?” she replied, “I can’t find you on the list… “Driftwood – It’s D-R-I-F-T-W-O-O-D and I don’t think I’m on the list – I’d emailed the head of Press and he’d said just bring your ID along!”. “Okay, let me enter your details Mr Deywood”. “Driftwood!” (LOL, oh well!… nice smile though). So I took my press badge with corrected credentials emblazoned and off I went into the Press Office. It was fully kitted out with a host of computers, Press release racks full of the latest must-read information, tables and chairs spread everywhere. But through the chaos, I spotted the café at the back and made immediately for a coffee. Dumping the suitcase at the cloakroom I rumbled through my pack to get out my GH4 + YAGH unit, a few lenses and my YAGH battery pack & belt plus the necessary Rode NTG1 and the Panasonic MS2 microphones. Cobbling them together, the cloakroom lady chuckled as I stuffed back into the suitcase my dirty clothes and socks. She gave me a ticket and off I went.

A commotion was building on the floors above and below the Press Office. In an hour the Samsung Launch was being held in auditorium 1, followed by another launch – Panasonic’s an hour later… auditorium 2. After going outside for a quick ciggie I decided to try and ring Igor to see if he was around the building yet. And a Skype msg later we both met outside the Samsung auditorium– Igor striding over to announce himself almost casually as though we’d met before. I suppose we had over the interweb but its always good to meet a fellow personal-viewer in the flesh for the first time. He’s a really friendly guy and we immediately struck up a good banter.

After scoffing down a few bevvies provided by the ‘Sammy’ girls we grabbed our Samsung Press cards and marched into the auditorium. A huge screen at the back and hundreds of people and press photographers/cameraman determined to grab the best places to capture the event.

As you can see by my video of the event I was shoved around a bit at the start and thought I’d better do something about it and push my way through to the front right side.

Without much time to setup I hit the record and held steady as best I could. No monopod or tripod as I didn’t have the suitcase room but perhaps next time I should remember. Keeping steady wasn’t too bad with the YAGH and IDX power unit wrapped round my belt to power the mic inputs but because I was saving the IDX power for later interviews I chose to record with the GH’s MS2 microphone. Not being ready meant that I couldn’t remove the extra weight of the unit which is a shame as I knew this would go on for some time…

The Samsung Launch started dramatically with a countdown and the greeting of ‘Find your Signature’ emblazed all over the screen (

). It makes me laugh when the PR & marketing gurus churn up old ideas with the word ‘Signature’ – the promise of discovering yourself through Samsung – this is for you. This is all you need. Now you’ve found it! Well let’s see.

The NX1 certainly comes across as something unique. A 28MP APS-C CMOS Sensor beast that promises us 4K video pictures from a possible 7K sensor. A new DRIMe Image Processor promising 15fps burst speed at top picture quality good looking design, robust design, high-speed autofocus and high shutter values (upto 51200) for low light all looks good. Also intriguing is that it is the first camera to sport the new HVEC h265 codec offering the same quality as h264 at only half the data rates. The Samsung executives were quick to sing its praises to a huge audience but the audience were subdued and there was a lack of gasps or wild applause.

Ok, it’s a nice looking 4K camera and one that firmly establishes Samsung’s intentions for the future and they were quick to solidify their announcements with more lenses – bigger and better than the rest! But later inspecting the camera the sdcard doors were firmly glued down so I couldn’t take any recordings away for analysis. Everything looked great though on the lovely 3.0" HD 1036k-dot touchscreen monitor and I can’t wait to fully review the NX1 in a forthcoming evaluation being arranged with Samsung. So the verdict is still out until I get my hands on it.

The Panasonic launch in Auditorium 2 (

) wasn’t quite as well attended as Samsung’s event – the danger of a near lunch time slot. It was a shame because they were showing off three new great-looking products, so I was glad I caught it.

The GM line has now come of age with the GM5 having built on the relative success of 2013’s GM1. Here we now have the GM5 with a built-in 1.166,000-dot electronic viewfinder, a hot shoe for accessories like flash, an ISO range now starting at 100 (to 25,600), improved burst speeds, faster focusing, Wi-Fi and a whole host of other photo/video features borrowed from the latest Lumix siblings. It’s a really beautiful little camera to hold in your hand and one that you can take with you anywhere. The next rabbit out of the hat was the announcement of the LX100. 799 quid gets you Panasonic’s new entry level 4K shooter sporting improved IQ, dynamic range, a Leica-badged 24-75mm DC vario Summilux lens (with a manual focus ring), improved ergonomics and software and all from a 12.8 megapixel M43 sensor. It really is a baby GH4 with many of the features found on the newly announced GH4 firmware (such as 4K photo mode), packed with features that won’t disappoint photographers or filmmakers.

However, it was the last announcement which took us all by surprise. The CM1 camera phone - and it looked very appealing. I’m fed up of my iphone and when they unveiled the CM1 I immediately felt the pang “could this be my next phone?” All looked good with its immaculate design, on screen touch menus and software plus a nifty 1” sensor (big for a phone!), a 20.2-megapixel chip built on the LX1000 standards, 4K at 15fps!?, HD level display, support for 128Gb mini sdcards and a cute 28mm f/2.8 Leica wide-angle lens to match. The phone itself is not unlike most of the decent Android 4.4 offerings from Samsung, but as soon as you flick the switch over to camera mode, the venus engine kicks in, and it comes into a world of its own. Its appeal is clearly targeted at people who want a cost-effective camera and use a phone but don’t want to carry around two devices and I think there will be a market for this. Is this Panasonic’s way of getting in on the phone market? Only time will tell if this is a success but it drew a lot of gasps from the audience and was clearly one of the favorite devices at the launch judging by the amount of people gathering round it after the event had finished. I love the on-screen integration of the focus, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, white balance in the software but you can still manually click through the lens adjustments using the lens barrel.

During the Panasonic launch we were treated to a drone demonstration by Aerial filmmaker Ferdinand Wolf using the GH4 who also sang the merits of the aforementioned M43 camera (

). It certainly seems like the GH4 has become the heart of all things Lumix at the moment and its amazing to see so many newcomers warming to M43 and the GH4 at the show. If the GH2 could be considered a success (helped by Vitaliy’s hack) the same can be said of what the GH4 has done for low budget hi quality filmmaking with its massive range of 1080 and 4K recording options.

After the two big Samy/Pany launch events it was off to have a look round at the many other products on display throughout the exhibition. So many items to see in only two days – it was simply not enough time. As it was getting late we decided to do this the next day as fellow personal-view.com Photokina regular Dieter Knüttel would be arriving to help.

Igor and myself went off to the Panasonic stand and met with Mark Baber from Panasonic UK (who Igor interviewed at

), Matt Frazer from Panasonic USA (who I discovered later that night, during a press booze up, is a huge fan of anamorphic Cine lenses and wants something to be done about this for M43s cameras – here’s Dieter’s interview ) and introduced to Michiharu Uematsu (Panasonic Japan’s special adviser from Imaging Business Group). Uematsu was extremely busy by the promised if he could find time he would arrange an interview the next day (see ) - we only got a few minutes with him in the end but I have been promised some decent time with him when he comes to the UK in October.

It was getting late so Igor and I collected my baggage and walked back from Photokina (instead of taking the short train ride) and over Cologne’s Hohenzollernbruecke Bridge. Here he showed me the thousands of Love Locks sprawled along the railings – padlocks with romantic inscriptions - in an amazing cacophony of colour and gleaming metal (http://lh3.ggpht.com/-ft3T-Z1pEHU/TnDwb-Bz2SI/AAAAAAAAQYw/Slo8Ad7qe_I/love-locks-1.jpg?imgmax=800). Apparently, as Igor recollected, the authorities had tried to remove them a few years back but there was such a demonstration about it that they relented and left them there. It looks amazing and its definitely worth checking out if you visit Cologne. Also the cable cars I noticed were running all along the centre of Cologne – so any keen photographer should definitely take a ride and his cameras along there.

So I left Igor and finally checked into the hotel and fell asleep for an hour – thoroughly knackered!

Later, around 9pm-ish I got up ate a delicious Bolognese and met up with for a night of merry boozing with some of the Panasonic team and a host of journalists from USA Today for convivial conversations about what products stood out, where cameras are going and what journalists want.

The USA Today crowd were all using cameras for video reporting as well as photos and its amazing to see so many young faces working for the big publications in the technology field. I think myself, Baber and Frazer looked a little out of place amongst such a cool looking young bunch - that included a fashionable looking Barnaby Sykes ( Panasonic UK/Europe Marketing) amongst the entourage. It was great to see Mark Baber of Panasonic UK facing off (in a nice way) with Panasonic USA’s Matt Frazer, and they were headlong in talk over the success of the GH4 and building on this with all the new products. Everybody seemed to be talking about the CM1 camera phone!

With much work to do I bade farewell to all and got back to the hotel for a little bit of editing and then some serious sleep.

Next day it was up early and off to meet Igor and the freshly arrived Dieter up at Photokina Press Office. A giant handshake from the martial arts black belt together with a big grin from Igor and the three of us made our way into the lions den that is Photokina.

Photokina is such a vast array of halls and products. The extremely thick and slick ‘Show Brochure’ doesn’t really help so you really need time to acclimatize and discover where things are. Dieter and Igor having done it before and explained that they still got lost around the H1,2,3,4,5….etc exhibition buildings!

We had a frantic day getting round each of the halls arranging interviews, waiting around for PR reps to appear, interviewing and videoing our subjects. Andrew Chan from SLR Magic was an extremely nice fella and gave a long and insightful interview about the R&D into Cine lenses before letting me borrow a SLR MAGIC HyperPrime CINE 10mm T2.1 lens for the rest of the day. It’s a fantastic lens, solidly built, with gorgeous optics and corner-to-corner sharpeness throughout. He invited me on their volunteer program to evaluate the lens for a forthcoming personal-view.com review and for their feedback. He explained to me that they had only a small team of researchers (five) who lovingly craft and design their excellent range. I’m really excited by their Cine lens series and I think you will be too.

There were other lens manufacturers to checkout too. Voightlander (who I didn’t get time to see but maybe Igor did?), Japanese optics co. Kowa were showing off their Promina M43 range with the 8.5mm f/2.8 looking particularly nice, Sigma who told us the M43 market was beginning to take off (probably in relation with the success of the GH4) and of course Olympus and Panasonic with their ever growing range that has been mentioned many times before.

We took a look at Sony but you couldn’t get near a spare A7S if you tried. They had fantastic all white exhibition stands with models, juggling footballers and a plethora of other guests to take evaluative shots of. A few of them were mounted on tripods and targeted at darkly lit still-life setups so you could see for yourself just how good they are in low-light.

The Canon ‘hostess’ girls provided the sparkle to the show. All of them were sporting red hair pieces and were eager to make everyone happy and show off the new (but not spectacular) 7D MK2 and the nifty Powershot G7 X. Their lens stand was very crowded and particular attention was drawn to the EF-S 24mm f/2.8, the EF 24-105mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM and the Super-tele EF 400mm f/4 DO IS II USM that I thought was amazing. I would love to try out the 400mm on my Canon 5DMKIII if only I had the wallet!

I must profess to coming over to Blackmagicdesign of late (sorry Vitaliy!) I’m not that excited by their Pocket, Studio or Cinema cameras, but, as a broadcaster I simply loved the spec of the URSA (and at THAT incredible price) and I finally had a good play on one, plus, there’s an excellent rundown of all its features in my interview with Stuart Ashton - General Manager EMEA (see

). I simply adore DaVinci Resolve 11 now as its a fully evolved editing system and I don’t have to leap back and forth to other NLEs (;-) even though I still do!) but I probably will find myself switching to this system alone in the very near future.

We had a good long look around many of the Asian products coming out and they are really way ahead now. There is so much good stuff that it is very hard to keep up. Special mention: I loved the Vavaron Birdycam stabilizer and am seriously contemplating buying one – the joystick control and gyro is smooth as f@ck!

Well, I’m running out of time and I’ve got to get this to Vitaliy before he bans me from personal-view for conflicting priorities – (Hey! I gotta work too you know!)

To cut a long story short I had a really good time out there in Cologne, it was great to meet the p-v.com guys (Igor took me to a beer tasting evening on my second (and final) day), and I only wish I had been able to take the whole week off and stay there but I had to get back for work commitments.

Next time I plan to be more equipped, film better (bring a mono/tripod!), sort the mics out, arrange interviews well in advance, GET SLEEP! and to take more notice of what you guys want to see and hear. Hopefully Igor and Dieter were able to cover a bit more in depth so please checkout the Photokina thread on personal-view com.

Nick Driftwood signing off… for now. :-)

@driftwood

I confirm it was a hell of a week, but it was a lot of fun at the same time.

Voightlander (who I didn’t get time to see but maybe Igor did?),

I have went and had a quick glance at the Voigtländer Nokton 10.5mm f/0.95 as well as their 42.5mm f/0.95 and I like both, even though I didn't have a possibility to take more photos than I did. IMHO, both are very decent lenses, but I really liked the 10.5mm "bokeh" :-)

It is uneasy to choose among Voigtländer 10.5mm f/0.95, SLR Magic T2.1 and Kowa 8.5mm f/2.8, since each have some interesting features.

Just donated. Thanks so much guys, fantastic job!

Great report Dieter. :-)

@driftwood @AKED Dieter and Nick, thanks for the nice description of our "adventures"! I hope we will see each other again before long.

Here are a few interesting facts taken from the official final report of the koelnmesse, the organizer of the Photokina. I have then seached for the report of 2012 and compared the figures:

From my point of view it seemed, that there were quite a few less people there. I was there only on one day, the first, but it seemed empty. But other people had the same impression than me who were there on the other days.

Also, a friend is a professional photographer who has a shop where he professionally prints photos for his customers in all sizes said, that there were a LOT less exhibitors in the professional ares. Large printing machines, professional studio equipment, backdrops, studio flash systems for professionals etc. About one or two halls less.

This impression is backed up by the numbers of exhibitors. According to the official numbers, the number of visitors stayed the same, which seemed strange to us.

Anyway, for all who are interested, here is the official final press report of the koelnmesse which of course sounds different.

http://www.photokina.com/media/en/photokina/downloads_32/pdf_37/presse_1/schlussbericht.pdf

Great work P-V team! Thanks for the exclusive e-pass!