Epson

Epson were justifiably proud of their new P-2000 multimedia storage viewer, a cute little portable image viewer with an excellent 3.8 inch VGA screen, 40GB hard disk, CompactFlash and SD card slots. At 212 pixels per inch the screen is the highest resolution portable viewer LCD on the market, and boy does it look sharp. It can display JPEG. Motion JPEG and MPEG-4 video files (at up to 30fps, VGA), and - surprisingly - RAW files from 'most popular digital SLR cameras'. Just to round things off there's MP3 and AAC music playback support. Very nice indeed.

Also new today is the L-500V; a 5MP, 3x optical (F2.8-4.9) zoom camera with a huge 2.5 inch screen (using the same high resolution PhotoFine technology as the P-2000 viewer). The camera itself is fairly basic stuff, but its screen is one of the best we've ever seen.

Visitors to the Epson stand were also able for the first time to get their hands on the R-D1 digital rangefinder camera. We spent a fair amount of time playing with this little beauty, which not only feels and looks like a Leica rangefinder camera, but it acts like one too. All those 'film' related knobs and levers have new functions; the film rewind knob is used to scroll through saved images on-screen. The viewfinder is incredibly bright, and it's big too. It still feels very strange to have to 'wind on' a digital camera between frames, but the mixture of digital and analogue is, well, sweet. No new information here, but nice to see cameras that appear close to production standard.