Photokina 2012

Last week the world’s leading imaging fair, Photokina took place again in Cologne Germany. Although our schedules were very tight we managed to squeeze in a visit to Photokina and especially the Sigma booth. This year they did not have a big surprise like 2 years ago, the Sigma SD1 was just announced back then, but the booth was very busy again.

New lenses

The day before the start of Photokina Sigma announced a reorganization of their lens lineup. Their lenses now are organized in three categories; Contemporary, Art and Sports.

Contemporary – featuring the very latest technology, and combining optical performance with compactness, the high-performance Contemporary line covers a wide range of needs. It’ll include standard zoom lenses, telephoto zoom lenses, high-magnification zoom lenses and more.

Art – designed with a focus on sophisticated optical performance and abundant expressive power, the Art line delivers high-level artistic expression. Large-aperture prime lenses, wide-angle lenses, ultra-wide-angle lenses, macro lenses, fisheye lenses and more will be part of this category.

Sports – while offering sophisticated optical performance and expressiveness, the Sports line lenses deliver high action-capture performance, enabling photographers to get exactly the shots they want. Here you’ll mostly find telephoto lenses, telephoto zoom lenses, super telephoto lenses, super telephoto zoom lenses and more.

Sigma SD1 with the new 35mm F1.4 DG HSM

Unfortunately we were not able to try them on any camera. Personally I have to say that they look very good and the Sigma people I talked to were very enthusiastic about the new lenses.

I encourage everybody to have a look at Sigma’s new special website about their new vision; http://www.sigma-global.com

The booth

Sigma’s booth was again quite big and white. This time it featured very, backlit portraits behind the counter with all the lenses. Especially the photo of the saxophone player looked amazing. All lenses for all brands that Sigma carries were of course there to try. Like last year the stand also featured a stage for presentations. It was a bit smaller though as on both sides there was a room scene build for trying out the lenses.

Absent this year were photos from Sigma users. They choose to display the results of the Sigma Our World Tour organized by Sigma Deutschland instead. They were displayed in the same way as the users images 2 years ago though, all around the back of the booth.

One thing I found remarkable was the color of the Sigma logo, it was mostly used in black. It looks like that Sigma is modernizing and cleaning up its style a little. (I’m a graphic designer, hence the interest).

Really big photos

A personal thing

We had one very special reason to visit Photokina and Sigma especially, we had a gift for Kazuto Yamaki and the company. Olga Vasilkova’s father, Vasily Poliakov, is a long time fan of the Foveon technology and admired the late Michihiro Yamaki for taking the bold step to build cameras using the Foveon sensor.

As a tribute he made a remembrance medal based on a photo Olga took of Michihiro Yamaki two years ago at Photokina. We were very happy that Kazuto Yamaki found the time for us so we could hand him this precious gift personally. We hope he will find a great place for it.

Bob van Ooik

Some photos

I didn’t take many photos but here are a few, just enough hopefully, to get an idea of the booth and such.