PhotoPlus Expo 2003

By Ernest Lilley

November 17, 2003

(PhotoPlus Expo 2003 :  Page 1 of 1 )

After attending a string of computer shows that made me wonder why they'd been held, starting with last year's fall Comdex and continuing through the recent TechXNY, going off to a photo show to check out the latest in digital imaging was a real treat, and one that fell on Halloween at that.

The show was well attended, not so well that I had trouble getting around, but enough so that the vendors were very happy with the turnout. PhotoPlus isn't the biggest U.S. photo show—that's a position held by PMA, the show of the Photographic Marketing Association, which will be held in Las Vegas this spring. It is, however, the last chance for manufacturers to release products in a significant forum before the end of the year, and there were a number of interesting things for me to stop and chat with company reps about.

What struck me most about the state of the art is how digital and film have merged to become just plain photography. An ad for Canon's 12 MP (mega pixel) 1Ds showed a picture with the caption: "Film or Digital? We can't tell either." In a display of images by one news photographer, the comment was made in the caption paragraph that the photographer wasn't sure whether it had been taken with his Nikon F5 or a Nikon D1x, and throughout the show, it was clear that the question was moot. Editors have gotten used to accepting digital submissions for magazines, and only a few places, notably image bank Corbis, are holding onto digital specs that came from drum scanner technology rather than digital cameras.

The coolest thing, speaking as a photographer, was that when you saw people looking at the galleries of images set up on the show floor by printer makers or trade organizations, or the images from the new book "America 24/7" which chronicled a week in the life of the country and was displayed at Bryant Park, was that it never even crossed my mind that these people were looking for pixilation in the prints or digital artifacts or even trying to figure out if an image was digital or not.

 Page 1 of 1