PMA 2007 Show Report

Welcome to the Digital Photography Review PMA 2007 show report preview. The Photo Marketing Association Annual Show will be held this year at the Las Vegas Convention Center between March 8th and 11th 2007. PMA is the photography industry's most important annual event, it's the place where the new year's hottest digital cameras and related products are announced. As usual we will be providing extensive coverage of the products announced at PMA as well as a live show report which will appear here on subsequent pages during the show.

Note: This is not designed to be comprehensive report of the entire show but rather a summary of the new digital camera and photography related products announced around and shown at PMA.

Jump to:

• PMA 2007 round-up
• Our show statistics
• New product index
• Live show report history
• Previous / Other reports

(Don't forget you can use the next page buttons to browse the stand reports).

PMA 2007 round-up

This year’s PMA felt busy; the Vegas location always helps visitor numbers and many of the booths were more compact and product-orientated than usual, perhaps an indication that the days of extravagance (when digital camera market growth was huge) are behind us.

In terms of sheer volume of new product this year’s PMA was one of the biggest ever, with over 110 digital cameras products announced at or just before the show. And yet there is little to get excited about; for the most part the products announced where minor upgrades or restyled versions of last year’s cameras, and the almost total lack of innovation is disappointing, though hardly unsurprising – especially given that Photokina was only 6 months ago.

On the SLR side of things – and despite Sony almost succeeding in stealing the show with the rather vague announcement of some new models coming at some time in the future – the highlight this year came from Olympus. Not only did the company show two new compact SLR models with strong feature sets (including live view), it also took the covers off a considerably more finished-looking successor to the E-1, a camera that people have been waiting patiently for since the days when the Pentax 645 Digital was new news.

Moving to fixed lens it is obvious that most of the major manufacturers no longer consider there is a need, or demand, for high-end compact cameras, thanks to the advent of the truly affordable (and increasingly compact) digital SLR. The only exception is the still-healthy ‘super zoom’ segment, boosted at PMA by the arrival of the Olympus SP-550UZ (as well as new models from Sony and Kodak). In a sea of me-too compacts we were also pleased to see that Sigma’s large sensor DP1 has developed considerably since the prototypes shown at Photokina.

In general the trends across the compact market make depressing reading for the photo enthusiast, perhaps less so for the average Joe looking for a family snapshot camera, for whom the range of models on offer has never been so numerous or so feature-packed. And with inexpensive digital photo frames a-plenty, the increasing use of Wi-Fi and (something to watch for next year) GPS positioning options, photo printer docks, in-camera effects and image stabilization you can hardly accuse the industry of standing still.

This year also saw high ISO becoming a standard tick box on even the most inexpensive cameras, something we’d be over the moon about if the impact on image quality were not so extreme. With some compacts offering ISO 8,000 or - in one case - ISO 10,000, it would appear that the issue of sensitivity (by far the biggest problem for small sensor compacts) is now the responsibility of the marketing, rather than engineering department. But no, high ISO (or ‘anti shake’ as it now appears to be officially known) – like Face Detection, red-eye removal and so on – is now just another tick box on a compact camera spec list.

So then, another year of more megapixels (now well into double digits), bigger screens, extra scene modes and lower prices. Another year with few surprises and little genuine innovation. But hey, we’ve never had it so good...

Our show statistics

• Show report: 19 stands, 262 images, 3,090 words posted live from the show floor
• News: 103 PMA product related news articles (includes some CES announcements)
• Products announced: Over 110 new digital photography products (major manufacturers)
• Site stats (7/Mar - 11/Mar; 5 days): 4.4 million visitors, 11.9 million pages read
• Forums (7/Mar - 11/Mar; 5 days): 61,000 messages posted

New Product Index (112 total)

Please note that all of the above products are brand new and just announced, our 'NEW' indicator simply marks those products which have been added to this list within the last three days. As usual we have also included several products announced at CES 2007 (suffixed [CES]), the main reasoning behind this is that these products join those announced at PMA to make up a manufacturer's new line-up.

Live Show Report (history of posting during the show)

You can also choose from two RSS feeds related to this show report, firstly the main live show report feed which will be updated live during show hours and the new product index feed which is updated whenever new products are announced.

Previous / Other reports

Our previous PMA show reports

• PMA 2006 report
• PMA 2005 report
• PMA 2004 report
• PMA 2003 report
• PMA 2002 report
• PMA 2001 report

Our Photokina show reports

• Photokina 2006 report
• Photokina 2004 report
• Photokina 2002 report
• Photokina 2000 report

Other PMA 2007 show reports

• Imaging-Resource.com