Four Cool Things We Spotted at PhotoPlus Expo Test Drive

PhotoPlus Expo is in full swing in New York City’s Javitz Center and show attendees had a chance to get an intimate glimpse of some new technology at the Test Drive event. Here’s a few products that caught our eye.

Sound Shark

Football fans have likely seen Sound Shark Audio’s huge parabolic audio collectors on the sidelines of NFL games. The company has slimmed those huge discs down to something that can easily fit on the hotshoe of a camera. The parabolic unit helps collect directional audio at greater distances than on-camera mics alone, providing about a 6x boost.  You can purchase the Sound Shark without a mic (you bring your own) for $285 or with a mic for $360.

GDU Premiere Drone

Shipping in November, the GDU Premiere drone features foldable props so the drone easily packs down into a backpack (fun fact: GDU beat both GoPro and DJI to the concept of the foldable drone with earlier iterations of its product). What’s also fairly novel about the drone is its interchangeable gimbal system. While the Premiere ships with a small 4K camera onboard, it’s actually built to carry payloads of up to 5 pounds. Forthcoming gimbals for cameras like Sony’s a7 will let you swap out cameras on this drone just as you would swap lenses on a camera.

Heavier payloads will reduce battery life however. With the 4K camera on board, the GDU Premiere gets about 32 minutes in the air–with a Sony a7 camera and lens in tow, flight times drop to 5-7 minutes. The Premiere will retail for $999.

BenQ SW320 HDR Monitor

While the creative public migrates to 4K displays, there’s an equally important shift toward High Dynamic Range. BenQ showed off its new SW320 display, an HDR monitor capable of displaying 99 percent of the Adobe RGB color space. Ideal for visual creatives, the 32-inch 4K monitor will retail for about $1,200 when it ships in November. It has a wired remote control that lets you easily change viewing modes or input sources. It offers HDMI 2.0 inputs to handle HDR sources. We had a chance to view a before/after demo with HDR on and off and the results are striking (our modest iPhone snapshot doesn’t do it justice).

Vuze VR Camera

The Vuze was announced at CES early this year but is just poised to ship now. The camera uses eight HD cameras to create three dimensional footage (360 x 180). Using desktop software, the eight independent video feeds are rendered and stitched automatically creating a single spherical video that can be viewed in VR viewers. It delivers high-quality resolution, 4K per eye, so the footage takes a while to render. On a computer with a robust GPU, it should render in real time with one minute of footage stitching in one minute’s time.

What Else We Learned….

Zeiss is readying a new ExoLens for the iPhone 7, which should ship next month. It will feature a slightly slimmer case. A version for the iPhone 7 Plus is taking a bit longer to develop as the company seeks to work with that model’s dual lens design.