Pre-PMA Canon and FujiFilm announcement roundup

It's been a busy morning in the sweaty-palmed build-up to the big PMA07 show -- and we're only just beginning. The premier international conference for photography wares doesn't officially kick-off until the doors swing wide on March 8th. Here's a quick roundup of all the new shooters, each adorned with plenty of steamy hot gallery action to get up-close and personal with anything you may have missed in the wee hours of the morn:

• Fujifilm's FinePix S5700
• Fujifilm's FinePix A820 and A900 for consumers
• Canon's new PowerShot A570 and A560
• Canon's compact PowerShot TX1 captures 7.1 megapixel stills and HD video
• Canon debuts SD750 and SD1000 Digital ELPH cameras
• Canon's EOS-1D Mark III DSLR with live LCD

[dunk @ Feb 22nd 2007 10:25AM]

why-oh-why can't camera manufacturers just make a good looking, pocket camera that supports RAW, has an ISO of at least 2000 and an optical zoom of 5x? it seems the better the picture quality the uglier the camera body and you don't start getting RAW support until start forking over $500+ bucks. i'm not a good enough photog to justify the expense.

i know RAW isn't the be-all-end-all of digital photograpy, but after teaching a class on compression algorithms my eyes are finely attuned to the flaws in DCT compression

[Craig @ Feb 22nd 2007 2:06PM]

I can tell you why Canon doesn't -- they want you to buy both a compact P&S and a larger SLR-type model. If they put too many features into one camera, too many consumers would be satisfied with buying just one camera. There are many manual controls that are essentially software-based that Canon doesn't put into its SD series, such as exposure control & flash strength.

That's why I think Canon dropped RAW in the S series and then axed the line altogether -- it had too many good elements (including size) to satisfy the average prosumer in one camera.

[Al @ Feb 22nd 2007 11:19AM]

RAW requires much more processing power which costs money and most people after a pocket camera don't need it so the manufacturers don't make it. Pocket cameras have small sensors and as people want their megapixels each pixel is very small which makes them noisy. You can't have both with current technology.

RAW is also generally wasted for the average snappers that buy cheap compacts.

The technology will get there I'm sure but it'll take time. In the meantime DSLR's will always have the advantage of large sensors, low noise and decent optics.

[dunk @ Feb 22nd 2007 1:28PM]

i have to dispute the claim that RAW requires more processing, it might take more time to write to the memory storage device and thus slow down shooting. as i understand it the actual processing of the image happens at the computer level with RAW whereas JPEG has to do in camera compression. most cameras shoot straight pixel data on the sensor and then have to convert that to JPEG, whereas a RAW image just writes the 1-to-1 pixel data and camera settings to the card offloading the processing to your computer the JPEG workflow surely has to take more processing power.