These reps knew nothing — I would never believe any rumor passed by them. They didn’t know the prices of their own equipment — they kept saying things like, “oh, I haven’t looked that price up in a while” when queried by others. I pulled a sheet out of my case that had list and BH’s prices on it. I had more info than the reps did.

Joe McNally did a great demo in the Nikon booth with the SB900 and the CLS.

I also played a bit with the D90. I didn’t realize the D90 was so small and light. It seemed to me that it was a lot smaller and lighter than the old D70 even, at least as how I remember it. I tried video mode and at least on the small display, it looked really good. I tried zooming and moving slowly and didn’t have any problems. Only in one movement did I detect any smeared pixels, but maybe it would have been more noticeable when played back on a standard-sized monitor.

Nikon gave out copies of their “digiguide” catalog, as they did last year. The catalog is dated Fall 2008, but the FM10, SB800, the D200 and the 28-70mm lens are still in there. The manual-focus lenses are gone! I don’t know whether that means that they’re still available on special order or that they’re no longer available at all. The catalog is a bit of a disappointment — while it has 12% more pages than last year’s catalog, it seems to have less information.

The show was busy, but not especially exciting. There really wasn’t anything new there. I did manage to get my hands on the new Leica MF prototype. It looks much better in person than it does in photographs. It’s very solid, very heavy, and has a really great rubber grip. The viewfinder is huge, but focusing was very, very slow. I mean really slow. They kept telling me, “this is just a prototype.” The lenses for it are gigantic. And as simple as the controls seemed to be, I was totally confused as to what they were for. There was one 3-position switch in which the middle setting was “FPS”. I asked the Leica rep what that meant. She told me “focal plane shutter.” I said, “yes, I know the camera has a focal plane shutter, but what does the switch do?” She couldn’t tell me. I bet it actually had something to do with the number of frames you can shoot per second.

I also tried the new LensBaby Composer, which I thought would be better than the original LensBaby products, which I returned after purchase once before. I still wasn’t impressed. Although much easier to use, I couldn’t get much of a desirable effect and I couldn’t get the center in focus – everything looked really soft. Maybe it’s just me.

Other than that, it looked pretty much to me as exactly like last year’s show, except with a few less exhibitors, which is probably a reflection of the economy.