June 21, 2003

Defining Moments: Two Centuries of Photography from the Ackland Art Museum collection: Toshiba has announced two new 10X zoom cameras: Kyocera has discontinued the Contax N Digital:

The Ackland Art Museum on the campus of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has put together a "survey exhibition, grouped according to the themes that have historically defined the medium's history: landscape, nature close-up, architecture, shapes of industry, the city, social documentary, portraits, and travel," from photographs in their own collection. The exhibition "Defining Moments: Two Centuries of Photography," includes photographs from as early as the 1840s. A section of Ackland.org devoted to the exhibition has a gallery with some small examples.

After years of producing awkward, glitzy little cameras, with intriguing new technical features that later wind up in good cameras by other makers, Toshiba is promising two new "M" models that look to be straight-forward and substantial. Both the PDR-M500 (2 MPxl - $349) and the PDR-M700 (3.2 MPxl $449) have a 10X Canon zoom lens (35-350mm equiv.); 2.5 inch LCD; SD card storage. They are said to have faster processing than previous Toshiba cameras and extensive manual as well as automatic exposure controls, including auto-bracketing. These two will be available in July. Maybe they will upgrade them with 4 - 5 MPxl sensor versions later on. Toshiba.com has a press release page where a PDF with info and specs can be downloaded.

Rob Galbraith is reporting that Kyocera — the parent company for Contax cameras — has discontinued production of their Contax N Digital. It was the first digital camera with a sensor that directly replaced the 24 x 36mm film aperture in a typical SLR at full frame size (meaning that its interchangeable lenses could be used without "factoring.") Bringing this camera to market began with about a year of promising that it would be produced and then several delays once ship-dates were set. While there are now other full-frame SLRs, "the best of both worlds," (film and digital) no longer seems like an absolute eventuality. Classic simplification may never make it to the drawing board. The expectation that all cameras should try to be all things to all people still has a grip on design and marketing.