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My name is Colin Warhurst, and I’m a Strategy Manager working for the . I wanted to write about what my colleague Spencer Marsden and I were up to last month in the city of Cologne at the world’s largest photographic and imaging trade fair Photokina.

For over fifty years Photokina has been a landmark entry in the photographic calendar, allowing for manufacturers and thousands of photographers to come together at one huge event. Traditionally Photokina is used as a vehicle to announce or formally launch new products, and as a result it is a trade fair that the 麻豆约拍 Blue Room monitors closely.

The 麻豆约拍 Blue Room is the 麻豆约拍’s consumer technology insight and research team. It is our job to analyse new technologies, hardware, software or platforms that may come to affect the 麻豆约拍, our competitors or our audiences. The Blue Room had previously visited Photokina in 2016 (it is normally held every two years) and so a return to this 2018 event allowed us to see what had moved on, as well as what maybe coming next in the fields of photography, videography, and other imaging technologies.

Not long after the 2016 trade fair, Photokina announced the need to change and “optimally reflect the fast-paced nature and the ever briefer innovation cycles of an increasingly digitalised industry.” The first action resulting from this statement was a change to the bi-annual schedule that Photokina has used for decades, making this September’s trade fair the last in that two-year cycle. May 2019 will see another Photokina event, just eight months after this event, marking the start of a new annual cycle held much earlier in the year.

Secondly, a sub-conference called Digility was absorbed into the larger Photokina trade fair. Digility was there to focus on immersive technologies such as Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality. The event was a mixture of trade fair style exhibits and a heavy focus on talks, lectures and Q&A panels with leading industry figures involved in these emerging technologies.

Needless to say, all of this meant there was a lot of ground to cover, and a lot of technology to investigate! We decided to split Photokina and Digility into separate assignments, and divvied up the investigations accordingly. As the Blue Room’s resident camera expert, I was once again asked to create a deep-dive report on the Photokina event, as I had back in 2016. The team’s R&D Engineer and immersive technology expert, Spencer Marsden, was assigned to Digility to create a report covering all of its technologies, trends and talks.

All of this work resulted in lots of photographs (naturally) and two detailed reports which can both be read in full over on the 麻豆约拍 D+E Medium blog, using the links below.

As a broad summary, we uncovered trends that matter to the 麻豆约拍 in the following ways;

• Almost every professional stills camera in the world is now also a professional video camera. The world of online video will only continue to increase in volume and image quality. Competition in the high-quality image stakes has never been so fierce.
• The continued rise of ‘mirrorless’ camera technologies ran throughout Photokina 2018, with most major vendors having a mirrorless camera system announced before the year’s end. Lighter, smaller cameras in the long term means a lower barrier to entry, and lower costs to get established in previously “high end only” formats such as digital medium-format photography.
• Being smaller and lighter, mirrorless cameras also take advantage of a whole swathe of new accessory technologies, primarily smaller handheld gimbals and stabilisers for video content. High quality “cinematic” images and production values are not just in the realm of professionals and top end budgets anymore.
• At Digility, companies were discussing Virtual Reality in a way that was well past the hype, and as a set of technologies that are starting to become useful in real-world applications, but all without the hyperbole.
• The world of XR (Mixed Reality) seems to be where most of the excitement lies, with vendors recognising the best way to access audiences en-masse is via the browsers on their everyday smartphones and tablets.
• The 麻豆约拍 needs to continue monitoring this space, as our audience may come to expect, to capture parts of the world as three-dimensional objects, or certain performances in a volumetric fashion.

Hopefully the above whets your appetite and encourages you to want to find out more about our Photokina and Digility reports, the detail behind our summary above, or more about the work of the 麻豆约拍 Blue Room itself.

We hope you enjoy following us down the rabbit hole!