DSLRRumors.com

There’s nothing much new here in the specifications department, but some interesting news on dates. According to Thom Hogan we should an annoucement in June, with a product on the shelves in August.

extratech.blogspot.com
jancology.com

“After much wrangling, major precision equipment manufacturer Pentax Corp. will be put under the umbrella of Hoya Corp., a leading optical glass maker.” read more

I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not, but at least this puts an end to the uncertainty. Now bring on the 645D!

According to Benjamin Kanarek there will be two new Pentax DSLRs announced in Paris this fall. Apparently neither of them are the 645D, but one can certainly dream.

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“The Canon retailer in Paris where I bought a lot of stuff just told me that Canon has annonced them the 40D will the there in July. They did not get any details (except it will be an EF-S compatible camera), but they say that the 5D replacement will not ship this year.”

source: http://pma-rumours.blogspot.com

There isn’t anything terribly new here, but it’s been pretty slow since PMA so I thought I’d post this. I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say “since they told us nothing was coming in the first half of the year, then something *must* be coming in the second half” but read on for more details.

www.photographybay.com

Canon has released Digital photo pro 3.0 to the general public. You’ll need your original installation disk in order to upgrade, here’s the link. http://www.canon.ca The major improvements that I’ve noticed is that it’s much faster, and you can now apply noise reduction on a shot by shot basis.

There is an interesting review of the current dust cleaning technololgies over at pixinfo.com The results are quite surprising. I really thought that things would work better. I’m still curious to see some real world results, the tests that they ran were pretty extreme.

Well, I think it’s safe to say that this years PMA has been pretty disappointing. The biggest news was the Olympus E410/E510, both of these seem like interesting cameras. In the Nikon camp you have the D40x, which I have to say was a bit of a surprise. I didn’t expect to see an upgrade to such a newly released camera. At the other end of the spectrum was Canon with it’s 1D Mark III, I think this was probably the most interesting as far as technology goes. Live preview, 10fps and dual DIGIC III. I think this gives us a glimpse of what’s possible. It looks like all the D3 and 1Ds predictions were wrong, as well as the 40d. I guess we’ll just have to wait for Photokina.

Sony has announced that that they are going to enter the professional DSLR market. Two prototypes were shown that target the advanced amateur and the professional photographer. Presumably these are based on the Konica/Minolta 7D and the next generation 7D. No real specifications are listed for these bodies, but they say one of them will be released before the end of the year. I’m not sure if Sony has what it takes to enter the professional market, the Canon/Nikon nut is a pretty tough one to crack.

Source:www.phtographybay.com

I’m not sure if I believe this or not. The live viewfinder I can see them adding, Canon has shown that this can be done in the 1DIII. In body image stabilization seems to contradict their message that in lens stabalization is better, and I’m not sure what would happen if you combine both. It seems like you would have to disable one or the other. As is pointed out by the author of the article, weather sealing has been offered by other companies in their lower priced bodies. So far Canon has used this as a differentiator between their pro and semi-pro bodies. Perhaps the competition has forced them to bring this to lower end models.
Everything else is as expected, higher resolution, lower noise, yada yada…

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