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PMA sure brings out the new camera announcements. I’m pretty excited to not be trying to cover all of the digital camera announcements coming out, since I’m sticking to the DSLR ones. There are some very interesting non-DSLR cameras being announced, but I’ll leave finding that information as an exercise for the reader.

Meanwhile, back in DSLRland, Sony has announced the A300 and A350. The Sony Alpha A300 is 10.2 megapixels, and the A350 is 14.2 megapixels. Both feature live view, with what sounds like a unique autofocus system. From the press release:

They both offer Sony’s new “Quick AF Live View” technology so you can frame photos on the camera’s LCD without sacrificing auto-focusing speed common to other live-view systems.

Sony’s innovative Pentamirror Tilt mechanism directs light to a dedicated live view image sensor, enabling fast and responsive TTL phase-detection auto-focusing, even during live view.

Eliminating the focus delay of other systems, the new models are equally responsive whether using live view or optical viewfinder.

With its two sensor design, Quick AF Live View can even continuously focus-track the subject and provide live view during burst shooting, helping you capture that special moment.

And Sony, being Sony, is including an adapter to let you use Sony Memory Stick flash media in the A300 and A350’s CF slot. They sure love pushing their weird proprietary formats that nobody else uses, huh? At least the camera isn’t a Memory Stick-only camera; they’re at least aware that doing that would kill it off as any kind of real threat for their competition.

Price and availability, again from the press release:

The DSLR-A300 kit with a DT 18-70mm f3.5-5.6 standard zoom lens will ship in April for about $800. The DSLR-A350 camera body will be available in March for about $800, and the DSLR-A350 kit with a DT 18-70mm f3.5-5.6 3.9x zoom lens will be available for about $900 at the same time.

Nikon has just announced their new D60 digital SLR camera. I’m not sure that introducing more naming conflicts to the DSLR world is necessarily a great idea (I’m talking about the aging — but not completely useless — Canon D60 here, which still pulls in about $200 on eBay.) But there you have it, a new D60, this time from Nikon.

It sounds remarkably similar to the Nikon D40X. And when I say “remarkably,” I mean “holy crap that’s the same camera resurrected from the camera graveyard for a cheesy sequel!” It has the same body, same sensor and resolution, same specifications, and so on. So, what are the differences? Let’s list them.

1. An anti-dust system that has both sensor shake and a special airflow design that’s designed to keep dust away from the sensor in the first place.
2. Active D-Lighting (which is becoming popular, but I’m still not convinced that it gives you anything that you wouldn’t get with Photoshopping your RAW files…)
3. Stop motion recording mode. Not exactly groundbreaking, and not anything that you wouldn’t rather do on the computer where you’d get more control over the video creation options.
4. The kit lens is now an anti-shake 18-55mm VR Nikon lens.

So, there you have it. It sounds like a pretty minor upgrade, if you ask me. Of course, if I’ve missed some huge nugget of awesomeness in the specs somewhere, please let me know in the comments. Maybe the D60 actually spits gold nuggets out of the memory card slot on demand. That could be pretty cool…

Sony held a press conference announcing that they’d have a new Sony Alpha DSLR coming out some time in 2008. Not many details are available, but what’s out there is pretty big:

This would be a 24.6 megapixel full-frame sensor DSLR. They’re calling their sensor “Exmor.” I don’t know, Exmor either sounds like a gigantic robot that will destroy all of humanity, or anti-acne medication. Either way, I’m not sure I want it in my camera. On the positive side, Sony promises that the sensor will have very low noise as it destroys humankind. It has something they call a “Column-Parallel A/D Conversion Technique” which has separate analog-to-digital converters for each column of pixels, if I understand right, which should help keep noise down. Surprisingly, given the current trend, the A/D converters are 12-bit, not 14-bit.

The as-of-yet unnamed flagship camera will also have in-camera image stabilization, and will be released along with new lenses (presumably to take advantage of the full-size sensor) and a new flash unit.

Good old PMA. Always full of camera announcements to keep the wheels of commerce rolling along. Go commerce!

First up we have the Pentax K20D. It’s similar to the Pentax K10D, with such upgrades as a 14.6 megapixel sensor manufactured by Samsung, live view, and an expanded dynamic range function. They say that the new sensor, while the same size as their competitors’ 12 megapixel sensors, has less circuitry around the edges, and therefore larger light-sensitive areas that let them get away with a higher resolution without more noise. It’ll be interesting to see what the tests turn up when K20D reviews start to come in. It fits in the midrange of DSLR models, above the also-new Pentax K200D, their entry-level model. The K200D is an update to the K100D, getting a resolution upgrade to 10.2 megapixels. It also features a weather-sealed body, and a CCD-based anti-shake system.

Also recently announced is the Samsung GX-20, which uses the same sensor as the Pentax K20D. And is all-around very similar; the body could easily be confused for a K20D body, and the resolution and main features are all the same. It sounds like Samsung has their own firmware, and they say they have different JPEG processing than the Pentax, but presumably the RAW files would be pretty indistinguishable between the GX-20 and K20D.

Pentax also announced a handful of new lenses: a 200mm f/2.8, 300mm f/4, 35mm f/2.8 macro, 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6, and a 55-300 f/4-5.8.