New Products From PMA in Las Vegas

March 5, 2009

multipage

The 2009 PMA Show in Las Vegas opened its doors this week and although crowds appeared perhaps a bit lighter, the atmosphere was business as usual and, thankfully, new innovation trumped talk of the deepening recession the nation is locked in.

It didn’t take long for the first big announcement to make headlines as Noritsu announced they were purchasing Vienna,Va.-based Lucidiom. The final terms of the deal are expected to close by the end of the month.

Lucidiom has emerged in recent years as one of the leading makers self-service imaging kiosks and Noritsu has maintained a leadership position for years on the minillab and dry printing technology front, pioneering the one-hour minilab concept and product in the early 1980s. In tandem, the pair combine for a formidable force in the retail print market.

Noritsu said it plans to leave Lucidiom’s East coast operations and management team intact. Lucidiom has roughly 50 workers in all. Under the terms of the deal, it will also get Lucidiom’s British operations, which serve customers in Europe. As we reported here in Clique last year, Noritsu and Lucidiom recently debuted a packaged photo kiosk and printer combination for retailers that allows consumers to make enlargements, greeting cards, calendars, posters, signs, scrapbooks and other items from their uploaded digital photos.

Zoom Bloom
With regard to innovation, no category has seen more of it lately than the digital camera market. For a category that is expected to see unit sales level off in the next year or so, manufacturers continue to give consumers reason to buy as “the latest and greatest” continues to get more and more intriguing.

In the Superzoom or “Bridge Camera” category, that was said to be headed the way of the APS system a while back, we are seeing a flood of new models that actually began at CES with new announcements from Kodak and Olympus. Well, PMA has continued the momentum here in Vegas and a new player has entered this space - Pentax.

The Pentax entry is the X70, a 12MP, 24X optical zoom model that also features a 2.7-inch LCD and what Pentax refers to as “triple shake reduction” – mechanical shake reduction via CCD shift mechanism, Digital Shake reduction via high ISO and Movie Mode  shake reduction as well.

Samsung’s big announcement was centered on their new NX series cameras, dubbed “hybrids” that, “offer the performance and image quality of a DSLR and the portability and convenience of a compact point-and-shoot.” Panasonic’s new Lumix GH1 graced this “hybrid” category as well. While we’re anxious to see what these two models offer up, both companies also fanned the Superzoom flame as Samsung showed the HZ15W, a 12MP model with a 10X optical zoom and Panasonic’s FZ28  still packs a punch at  10MP with an 18X zoom. The newer ZS3 checks in with a 12X zoom.

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