Ricoh officially announces modular GXR camera system

In what has to be the oddest new camera technology announcement of 2009, Ricoh unveiled its GXR system. It's not a mirrorless interchangeable lens (dare I say EVIL?) system, as was rumored around the blogosphere, but what the company catchily calls an "Interchangeable Unit Camera," where the "Unit" in question is a lens/sensor module which slides into a housing that includes the rest of a point-and-shoot's pieces--920,000-pixel 3-inch LCD, controls, hot shoe, and flash. A tiltable EVF that fits in the hot shoe will be optional.
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Lexar unveils new UDMA 6 CompactFlash cards

Lexar follows close on the heels of SanDisk's announcement of its 90MB per second Extreme Pro CompactFlash card with its own player, the Lexar Professional 600X. Like SanDisk's, these expensive, ultrafast cards aren't for everyone; as detailed in the Extreme Pro post, you really need to be shooting with a fast, high-resolution camera recent enough to support UDMA 6 or frequently downloading lots of files with a fast reader to see the benefit.

I repeated the casual testing I did with the SanDisk card, and while the Lexar seems to be faster overall than the SanDisk, there are two things to keep in mind: different capacities will frequently perform differently and Lexar doesn't make the same durability claims or seem to invoke the error-correction algorithms SanDisk touts; the latter probably add some performance overhead, and might be a valuable trade-off for some shooters.
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Do you really need SanDisk's 90MB/sec CompactFlash?

Despite its being out of vogue at the moment, I'm still a big believer in the faster-is-better philosophy. That said, I also recognize that it's not always worth the extra cost for some people, and that not everyone can or will always take advantage of it. So that's why I always take announcements about new, high-performance media cards, like SanDisk's 90 megabyte-per-second Extreme Pro line (along with Transcend's similar 600X CF), with a grain of salt. And after running some casual tests on the new card, I've concluded that for now, even only a limited number of pros will see worthwhile advantages to the faster model given the price premium you'll pay.
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Epson Stylus Pro 3880 gets Vivid magenta, tackles metamerism issue

Epson is replacing its Stylus Pro 3800 medium format (17 x 22-inch) printer with the 3880, rolling its latest set of technologies down the product line from the Stylus Pro 4880, as well as introducing a new version of its screening architecture.

The 3880 is getting the 8-color UltraChrome K3 Vivid Magenta ink set that's already been incorporated in most of Epson's other pro graphics printers, plus the same ink-repellent coating on the printhead to minimize nozzle blockages. With this model, Epson introduces Accuphoto HD2, an update to its screening technology with look-up tables co-developed with RIT; the new LUTs go a step beyond choosing the appropriate color for any given dot to selecting the appropriate color with the lowest metameric index (i.e., the least likely to change appearance under different lighting conditions).
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Sony's new full-frame A850 under US$2,000

News of the A850, Sony's full-frame follow-up to the Alpha DSLR-A900, surfaced on the Web weeks ago--Sony itself accidentally leaked the entire manual, for pity's sake--but the most important aspect of the product, the camera's price, remained only speculation. Without that context, one really didn't know what to make of the subtly stripped-down version of the A900. Now we know it'll cost US$1,999 for the body, making it the least expensive full-frame dSLR currently available. That makes it newsworthy, but does that automatically make it droolworthy?
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