The king is dead, long live the king – the call of the herald, which once announced the continued existence of the French monarchy, is only effective if there is a successor. However, this is not the case with the Photo Industry Association (PIV). The committee will simply be dissolved at the end of 2024; it is unclear who could inherit it.
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Since 1948, the association has primarily looked after equipment manufacturers and retailers, in the style of a classic business association. The flagship event was always the giant Photokina trade fair in Cologne, which took place from 1950 to 2018. With the end of what was at times the most important photography trade fair in the world, the end of the PIV was also in sight. Because it's about money, the association is breaking up for financial reasons. Apparently the income from Photokina was quite important, even if Kölnmesse GmbH was the official sponsor.
No danger to the Photopia
There is no need to worry too much about the quasi-successor, the Photopia in Hamburg, because there was a clear statement about the extension at the 2023 press event – if then for three years. This is now the case with Photopia 2024. Although the PIV still serves as an ideal support there, it was hardly visible last year. Since the trade fair business is generally changing significantly and the pandemic brought it to a complete standstill for two to three years, depending on the event, one should not blindly rely on such promises. Although it was suffocated by completely different problems, we should still remember Cebit: There was also a promise to carry out the new event concept from 2018 for at least three years, but the trade fair was finally stopped after just one attempt.
SD cards are likely to last a little longer as an important storage medium in cameras, even if our author Matthias Proske predicted the “silent death” of the cards this week. His detailed analysis traces how the once powerful “SD Card Association” – another industry body – is slowly but surely letting the “Compact Flash Association” take the butter off its bread. Because new standards such as UHS-III and SD Express are not gaining momentum compared to the CFExpress cards.
How CFExpress is slowly replacing SD cards
Without these existing and very fast cards, speed monsters like the Sony A9 III would be unthinkable. We were finally able to present their extensive test at the beginning of the week. It also shows how easily CFExpress could displace SD cards in addition to all the competing standards and speeds, because it has two combination slots for both types of cards, like other Alphas.
So it doesn't take much effort for camera manufacturers to support both formats, and experience has shown that the more modern standard always prevails. Yes, the story of the victory of VHS cassettes over the technically superior Betamax is also known in this column, but that is rather an exception in the history of technology. And above all due to Sony's initially rigid licensing policy.
Retro Instax with internal LED lighting
If you want to establish a new, proprietary format today, you have to offer a broad ecosystem around it right from the start. Fujifilm did this with the small Instax instant film and since then has also offered more sophisticated devices in addition to the small, colorful and inexpensive Knips cameras. Like the new Instax Mini 99, which is only retro on the outside. Inside, however, it has a kind of analog image processing: thanks to suitable software, four LEDs can bring the color moods with the chic marketing names Warm Tone, Faded Green, Sepia, Light Leak, Soft Magenta and Light Blue directly onto the instant image.
A pleasant side effect for the manufacturer: When you have tried all of them together with the new vignette control, one of the film cassettes with ten images is almost used up. It is also possible to offer another format, keyword ecosystem. Called “Photo Slide,” it is intended to evoke the feel of slide film, even if the Mini 99 can still only expose chemical images. The previous Instax cassettes still fit. With a controllable vignette and some exposure control, Fuji charges 200 euros for the camera, more than twice as much as the small Instax models and more than for the hybrid Instax Mini Evo, which can also save images digitally. After all: thanks to the LEDs and the new exposure control, it offers significantly more creative photography than previous Instaxe.
Nikon's Red is supposed to show itself at NAB
Nikon will soon be venturing into completely new creative fields after taking over Red. How both companies could fit together technically has already been examined in detail, and of course the rumor mills are now busy. When even Nikonrumours, which describes itself as a rumor site, explicitly points out the status of the following as, well, a rumor, half-baked results are to be expected. What still seems most plausible is that Nikon wants to comment on the future of Red at the NAB broadcast trade fair in April 2024.
But the fact that the Z 6 III camera, which has been awaited for a long time, is already equipped with Red technology is highly speculative. At best we would expect the redraw codecs in the camera. This seems believable because Adobe has officially stopped developing its tools for Nikon's N-Raw for the time being. However, it is doubtful whether there will be Red cameras with Z-mounts and matching cine lenses any time soon – the development effort for this is huge. In addition, professional filmmakers are used to adapting bayonets other than those of the camera.
Sony World Photo Awards winners and shortlists
This time our recommendation for a long read for the weekend is more of a “long click”, namely through the gallery of the winners of the Sony World Photo Award. It not only shows the winning images, but also many of the shortlists in the individual categories. And of course the associated stories, because that's what it's all about in addition to the visual and technical brilliance of the images. The overall winner, which also serves as the cover photo, impressively shows the contradictions of nature: a floating village lies peacefully in Lake Titicaca, while a wildfire is approaching on the horizon.
(NO)