INON had fewer new products this year, but Steve Philbrook and Mark Rupert showed me a full line of compact digicam housings and accessories in addition to their popular strobe models, the Z-240, D-2000, D-2000s, and Z-22 ring strobe.

A new 180° straight viewfinder prototype will please those people looking for a magnified viewfinder who hate 45° models. The new viewfinder is 1:1 and designed for APS-sized sensors. It should ship sometime in January...

Peter and Gunild Symes were at the X-Ray Magazine booth showing off their free electronic magazine. Starting in 2008, X-Ray will ramp up its publishing schedule to 8 issues a year. Harald Apelt, former editor-in-chief at Tauchen magazine, recently joined the X-Ray team.

Light & Motion had an exciting new line of LED video lights on display. The Sunray 1000 and 2000 video lights both use bright LEDs, which offer instant on/off and solid-state design. Because the LEDs have a 50,000 hour bulb light when not overdriven (these are not overdriven), users should never have to replace a bulb again!

The Sunray 1000 uses 9 LEDs, and is compatible with older battery packs, which means that you can upgrade your system by just buying new heads (although older battery packs do not support multiple brightness levels). The 1000 should last 65 minutes at full power. The new battery is a 6-cell lithium-ion pack, which support 3 different light levels...

Backscatter showed off quite a few products at their booth, but we'll focus on the new products. Backscatter boys Berk, Jim, Dave, and Marshall manned the booth.

First, Backscatter and Reef Photo & Video are now sharing USA distribution of Seatool products, so Backscatter had Seatool housings for Sony HDR-SR7/HDR-SR8 (AVCHD onto hard drive) and HDR-CX7/HDR-CX8 camcorders (AVCHD onto MemoryStick media). Also on display was a Seatool prototype housing for the Nikon D200 digital SLR...

DivePhotoGuide and Wetpixel.com are sharing a booth this year! Wetpixel is at the DPG booth showing off our new print magazine, Wetpixel Quarterly. If you haven't seen it yet, come see us!

DivePhotoGuide has just re-launched their website. Check it out -- it still features the most complete professional underwater photographer gallery anywhere on the web, and also has a great photo contest directory. Also with the relaunch, winners of Wetpixel's public-voted Photo of the Week contest will be eligible for a gallery at DivePhotoGuide.