Fujifilm

No new digital SLR from Fujifilm this PMA, which will disappoint S2 and S3 users hoping for a camera body to match the quality of the Super CCD sensor; we can only hope that Fuji has something up its sleeve for the summer (though we suspect we won’t hear anything until Photokina in September).

Still plenty of activity on the large Fujifilm booth, however, mostly revolving around the much-anticipated successor to sleeper hit the FinePix F10, the F30. It’s not the camera a lot of users wanted (the F30 is still essentially a souped-up point-and-shoot model), but Fuji does appear to have listened to some of the feedback and has added a few manual controls and – most importantly – has kept the excellent sensor that made the F10 a little bit special. We were a little disappointed to see the high ISO being sold as 'picture stabilization', when it's really high shutter speed, but that's marketing for you.

The other compacts on show – including four models launched last month at CES – are less exciting (although the V10, with built-in arcade games is being pushed hard). New for PMA are the F600 and F650, which take over from the low-cost, feature-rich E series compacts.

Finally a few R&D showcases, including a new chip with advanced face recognition that is claimed to work in under 0.05 seconds and to be able to recognize up to 10 faces in a scene, and focus and expose accordingly. Look out for cameras with this technology in the third quarter of 2006.