The hall

NOVEGRO PHOTO CINE 2000

Last October 28th and 29th 2000 we had our stall at 5th edition of Novegro Photo Cine collectors' fair in Milano-Linate airport area. Dino, Ermanno, Giordano, Lorenzo and Massimo managed the table for the weekend, while Maurizio and me backed them up on Sunday.

AOHC continued celebrating 20 years of the LX and 25 years of Pentax K-bayonet. To that purpose, we set up a small exhibition of LX versions, including the cutout, the Gold and the Titan, which gathered public attention. Then, Ermanno also printed some nice posters showing the LX prototypes published in Spotmatic No. 25 and elsewhere in this same magazine. Due to its size, a "big gun" SMC Pentax-M Reflex 2000 f/13.5 we borrowed from our friend Arnaldo attracted the public even more.

We also had some promo gadgets from Protege and Pentax Europe to give away, including the Pentax medium format CDROM (very well done) and the EI-2000 pin.

Protege lent us the EI-200 and EI-2000 digital cameras, together with an HP ink-jet printer. Giordano added his own computer, so that we put toger a nice digital darkroom. I was very interested in testing the EI cameras in available light.

Wicked that we are, we had a 3.3 Mpixel Nikon Coolpix 990 for comparison. It has to be said that the 2.2 Mpixel of the EI-2000 was quite competitive against one of the top digital cameras in the world, at least under favourable light.

As a brief report, I can sum up that Pentax digital cameras manage good light very well, while some work is still necessary at Pentax/HP labs to control speckle (electronic noise) in dim light conditions like we got in the fair hall. Also, color balance shows some magenta cast to be corrected.

The picture you can see by clicking on thumbnail has been reduced to 640x512 pixels from the 1600x1200 one we took with EI-2000.

AOHC area

AOHC members trying the EI-2000

Cutout Pentax LX