The award for the best booth at photokina goes to the kooks at Lomography who covered every inch of space with Lomo photos while proudly proclaiming "The Future is Analogue."

(Cologne, Germany – September 23, 2008) Though much of the buzz on Day 1 of the photokina international trade show in Cologne revolved around the surprise announcement of the new 37.5-megapixel Leica S2 – mentioned elsewhere on PDNonline – a few other more incremental camera and printer upgrades also caught our eye on the show floor

Whereas Leica's S2 is a real, living breathing nearly working camera – we'll have more details later in the week when we get to play with it during our one-on-one meeting with Leica – Olympus was showing two "concept" cameras under glass. Both Olympus cameras just brush the pro category – maybe a notch or two below – and have a couple of potentially interesting features.

The first model – neither has been named yet – will slot just below the pro-level Olympus E-3. The concept camera – kind of a dumb term for it because it's pretty far along in development and will ship early next year – closely resembles the 10-megapixel E-3 but smaller. Many of the features will be the same including high-speed autofocusing, face detection, shadow adjustment and an articulating 2.7-inch screen but the camera will add some additional "creative control." What that "creative control" includes is somewhat vague at this point though.

"It's going to be for the type of artistic photographer who might want the kind of adjustment control you get in the camera stage rather than in the software stage afterwards," Olympus' Sally Smith-Clemens told us. "Think of this creative control as being able to simulate the sorts of things you would normally purchase a filter system for."

The second camera shown under glass by Olympus uses the new Micro Four Thirds sensor concept which allows for smaller cameras. This concept camera from Olympus is aimed more towards prosumers and is small with a prototype body that looks like a classic rangefinder. The concept model had a real retro look to it with a light brown faux leather grip – we like it a lot actually – though who knows what it will look like by the time it comes to market.

HP's New Z3200 Printer
The big professional printer news at the show came from HP which unveiled the Designjet Z3200 Photo Printer which replaces the Z3100, a groundbreaking model announced two years ago at photokina 2006. The new Z3200 comes in 24-inch and 44-inch models and uses a 12-ink system that adds a "73 Chromatic Red" ink which enables 95 percent Pantone coverage. The new ink, as expected, produces better reds. (It would be funny if it didn't though.)

"There's a phenomenal improvement in color gamut and in range," said Ben Wolf of HP. "You're going to be getting really bright reds and magentas out of this printer."

Other improvements include 20 percent faster speed; an enhanced HP Color Center tool that lets you more easily perform calibration and profiling via the built-in spectrophotometer – a revolutionary feature at the time the Z3100 was released and now imitated by several of HP's competitors – and new capture-to-print software developed in collaboration with Nikon to help more easily produce fine-art reproductions.

New Sigma Same as the Old Sigma?
Along with introducing the lackluster SD15 digital SLR at photokina, Sigma has unveiled an upgrade to the interesting but flawed DP1, a compact digital camera which uses a digital SLR sized imaging chip. (We reviewed the DP1 in the June 2008 issue of PDN.) The new DP2 offers a few tweaks to the older camera but nothing that seems significant at first blush.

The DP2 uses the same 14MP three-layer Foveon X3 that's in both the DP1 and SD14, and SD15. (You'd think they'd want to put something new in their cameras by now right?) The only significant addition to the camera is a new image-processing engine – dubbed the "True II." As anyone who read our review of the DP1 knows, that camera was slow as molasses so this new processor will, hopefully, speed things up in the DP2. And that's the truth.