Roger W. Hicks & Frances E. Schultz

Every photokina, we are assigned a category that for want of a better term we call “weird and wonderful.” It’s stuff that doesn’t easily fit into any other category, or differs so much from the mass of its competitors that it deserves special mention.

Some products are just bizarre: we’ll come to what we thought was the most bizarre trend at the end...

Understatement almost always speaks louder than overstatement; or if not louder, then generally with more authority. The four new Leica Summarits, for M-series Leicas, Zeiss Ikons, and Voigtländer Bessas, are about as far from ostentatious as you can get; they are merely first-class tools for the photographer who knows what he or she is doing.

Neither the...

Pick up the new Bessa R3M (or R2M--only the viewfinders differ) and it takes you back in time. At a solid 430 gm (a fraction over 15 oz) it has the heft and overall feel of a high-quality camera from the 1950s or '60s. Appropriately, it is the best Bessa yet, produced to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of Voigtländer, and is engraved...

When Shutterbug reporters are covering photokina, we understandably concentrate on what's new, and we each have our own assigned ranges of subjects. As a result, even after allowing for my "Weird Stuff" category, a number of really useful items and trends can either fall into the gaps between our coverage--"I thought you would be covering...