Photokina
The leading trade fair for photo and video presents surprising new perspectives.
Some people have the best ideas when they are on holiday. That is what happened to Jonas Pfeil. He developed his business concept in the South Pacific in Tonga. He happened to be looking for a simple way to create panorama photographs in the holiday paradise without having to take several individual pictures and laboriously fit them together on the computer later. Back in Germany he put into practice the idea he had formulated in his diploma thesis at Berlin’s Technical University. Five years ago he presented the first prototype of a high-resolution 360 degree panorama camera. A year later he founded the company Panono together with his fellow students Björn Bollensdorff and Qian Qin. The young entrepreneurs collected almost three million US dollars via crowd funding and used it to develop what they described as “the world’s highest resolution 360 degree camera”. It has been on the market since the end of 2015 and is now being presented at the Photokina trade fair in Cologne. The smart sphere is called Panono Explorer Edition and it produces all-round panoramas in a resolution of more than 100 megapixels. At a single click 36 individual cameras photograph the panoramic image. Meanwhile, the young German entrepreneurs now employ some 30 colleagues in Berlin.
Drones with cameras offer new perspectives
Visitors can admire and test this and many more innovations at the leading trade fair for the photo and video sector. Under the trade fair’s heading “Imaging”, around 1,000 enterprises, specialist equipment suppliers and start-ups from 40 countries are presenting the latest technological developments for smart home functions for cameras, cloud services, apps, wearables, augmented and virtual reality. The real and the digital worlds merge to form new images. Photo and video workshops as well as spectacular large projected images on the Rhine offer the chance to experience all the facets of the image as a medium. The combination of drones and cameras is also designed to awaken the visitors’ playful instincts. They can also try their hand at photographing on test flights, while experts demonstrate the great potential of these flying objects for bird’s-eye-view photography and video.
Photokina from 20 to 25 September 2016 in Cologne
