Tuesday was my final day at the show. It started with a quick trip over to the Flamingo Hilton to attend a breakfast event. This was InfoTrends Research Group's InfoScape 2000. They invited all sorts of people in the digital imaging business (mostly consumer) to hear some speeches and panel discussion and to see some exhibits. Since I'm involved in designing lots of things to work with pictures at Trellix, this was a good thing for me to attend.
It was a sit-down, buffet breakfast. First someone from InfoTrends gave a quick overview of some statistics: In the US unit sales of digital cameras will surpass film in 2002 (digital revenue was greater in 2000), this year over 20 million households will view online photo albums at photo communities, etc.
The keynote speaker was from Sony. He talked about integrating digital imaging into the "consumer digital lifestyle". Like many others he talked about storage (especially high capacity removable flash media) and wireless.
InfoTrends slide with growth of scanner and digital camera sales, Sony exec, teleprompter operator in the foreground, the audience
The keynote was followed by a panel which was given questions. There were people from Agilent (maker of optical sensors), Fujifilm (which was the co-developer of Zip disks), Kodak, SpotLife (web service with streaming personal video), Yahoo!, and Zing (a photo sharing community). I found it quite interesting. Lots of discussion about where pictures will be stored.
Panel
After the panel, we got to walk around the room to the many exhibits. I have pictures here of some of the things. There were lots of digital camera manufacturers showing their stuff. One interesting one shown here is the Sanyo iDshot. It's a 1.5 megapixel camera with a built-in iD PHOTO disk drive. One removable $35 iD disk holds 730MB. The camera does still photos as well as 640x480 video at 30 frames per second. Cool. Available next year for about $1,300.
Digital cameras from Nikon and others, the new Sanyo iDshot with 730MB removable disk
There was a display of software that takes multiple photos and stitches them into 3D images. This was not a consumer thing.
3D camera, subject, her image rotating derived from just two photos
More digital cameras. The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P1 that I'm holding looks really nice. They just started shipping them. It's tiny, the lens retracts completely and gets covered, 3 megapixels, 3X optical zoom, video with sound, etc., etc. I want to try one! They say it lists for $799.
Fujifilm cameras, the Sony Cyber-shot
There were displays of wireless transmission of photos. There were hardware people like Agilent, which showed their CMOS optical sensors that are used in the Microsoft optical mouse and many webcams.
Connecting a digital camera to a cell phone with special software, optical sensors in mice and cameras
More cameras. These are from Olympus. I got to try their 2 megapixel camera that has a 10X optical image stabilized lens. It really let you handhold when zoomed way in. I also tried their new SLR with a nice, but fixed, lens. The viewfinder is an LCD, not ground glass like a normal single lens reflex camera. It actually looked OK (it goes dark when the mirror goes up, just like a film camera). I also got to look a little closer at the camera with the built in Polaroid photo printer that Karen used the night before. Interesting thing for parties. The prints are quite small, about 2"x3" but sharp, and you can make multiple copies of a picture (Karen gave a copy to both Bob and me).
Olympus cameras, close up of the Camedia with instant Polaroid printer
Next I saw a home video recorder which burns CD-Rs with MPEG movies. They said it would be about $599. The quality wasn't bad. I also found a booth that was just tech support people ready to help the other booths. Nice touch. IBM showed their Microdrive that's very popular with professional photographers, including the new 1GB one.
Home MPEG on CD-R recorder, tech support, IBM Microdrive
Kodak had a display of some of their cameras, including the PalmPix that goes on a PDA. Lexmark showed some printers, including one with a scanner that could do multiple copies at once on a page.
Kodak cameras, Lexmark scanner/printer
Going around to all the booth took a while. Also, there were some people I needed to talk to. By the time I got out, the complimentary buses to the Convention Center had all left. I walked over to the Venetian Hotel. Here's a view of a little piece:
Venetian Hotel
I shared a cab with another person over to the Convention Center. The traffic got real heavy near the Convention Center, so we quickly got out at a place where we could walk easily to the main entrance. I went in the front and went up to the second floor. I had a bit of food at a Ziff Davis hospitality room, then walked around to other rooms up there.
View looking down from the second floor, walking around the second floor
In the Panasonic room they were showing things based on their flash memory cards. One neat looking one was a music player.
Panasonic flash memory and tiny music player
I went down the first floor to visit some more booths. At the bottom of the escalator I ran into Larry Niven and his wife. I asked him if I could take a better picture of him since some of my readers, who are his fans, were interested. We started talking about a variety of topics including the map design of Trellix Web, and eventually the three of us walked over to a Key3Media hospitality suite for lunch (I got to finish getting enough to eat). I really enjoyed talking with them. It turns out that his wife went to MIT and lived in the same dormitory as I did (Bexley Hall). I almost never run into somebody who lived at Bexley.
The Nivens, some guys with painted bodies we passed by
That's it for Tuesday morning.
The next page pretty much only has pictures. I'll add narrative in a day or two, and also a page of general observations.
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