Some years ago, I helped a now-former-co-worker with his moviemaking. My biggest contribution was being the caterer and making sure that his cast and crew was the best fed cast and crew in the entire bay area film scene....

One of the central arguments of the 4/3rds mount was that digital camera sensors were destined to stay small, thus, a new mount for these smaller sensors, with a smaller lens throat and registration distance so that the lenses could be smaller and lighter, only covering that 4/3rds mount size. Of course, Olympus kinda screwed it up.

Sadly, the Pentax medium format lineup seems to have reached it's final end, much to the dismay of my friends who are too limp-wristed to carry a Real Man's Camera (i.e. the Mamiya RB67/RZ67)

Pentax announces the P70, with a 28mm-e wide angle. Yes, people are suddenly realizing that it's more useful to go wide than long. I'm not complaining, given that I've been saying this for years now.

Impressed by the 50 megapixel Kodak sensor? How about a 60 megapixel sensor that's actually full-frame 6x4.5?

There's been some hope that we're going to stop seeing the fairly stupid megapixel race progress and might actually see some new features in cameras. As usual, it didn't happen this PMA.

I've been nursing a desire to save up a bunch of money and go to the Polaroid 20x24 studio for a session. I guess I still can.

Polaroid is announcing that they will supply some Polaroid film. Of course, it's only the same stuff that Fuji already manufactures....

There's some folks spouting off about the Polaroid situation. It really sucks to lose your primary photographic medium and there's a lot of subtle points to making film that nobody outside of Kodak, Polaroid, Fuji, Agfa, and a few others really know, so there's a lot of uninformed emotional blathering and wishful thinking...

So, we've known for a long time that Polaroid has lost their way. See, back in the seventies and sixties, they were a brilliant company that could do no wrong, led by Dr. Land and a team of expert engineers....

The thing about the people who still shoot 8x10 and 20x24 polaroid film is that they are most likely to be able to put their mouth where their money is when they say they'll pay whatever it takes.

So it looks like Polaroid might be saved after all. Again, see how the important part was that they purchased the original factory and hired some of the original engineers, just like I pointed out they'd probably need to do.

I'm somewhat sad about this. The latest Rollei 6x6 system sold as the Leaf AFi and Sinar Hy6, is the closest digital to having the Mamiya RB67 user experience. But Leaf is now owned by Phase One... and Phase One is already committed to the Mamiya system. But Rollei has been in bad shape for a long time now, so I'm not surprised.

Like I said before: "...if [the 4/3rds design] works out for Olympus, it's trivial for Nikon, Canon, Pentax, or Sony to pull the exact same stunt.." I just forgot to mention Samsung specifically.

Because I view my "primary" cameras as being best carried as clusters of heavy but high-quality hardware, I've realized that I'm really a Serious Compact junkie without realizing it.