According to reader's digest, 14 out of 16 European countries vote Canon as the "Most trusted" camera brand - for the tenth year in a row. Quite an achievement, especially given the tumultuous time they have been getting on various web forums in recent years.

Press release:

Canon celebrates a decade of ‘most trusted’ camera brand in Europe with Reader’s Digest
·        Consumers in 14 out of 16 European countries vote Canon ‘most trusted’
United Kingdom/Republic of Ireland, March 1st  2010 – Canon, world-leader in imaging solutions, has been voted as Europe's top camera brand for the tenth consecutive year in the Reader’s Digest Most Trusted Brands Survey 2010, an annual pan-European survey of consumer attitudes to brand products and services.
Reader’s Digest asked its readers in 14 languages across 16 European countries to nominate the brand they trusted most in a range of consumer categories, including cameras.  Respondents were drawn from the Reader's Digest customer database of 4.5 million homes in Europe, and more than 32,000 responses were analysed.
Canon was one of only three brands nominated as ‘most trusted’, Canon coming out on top in 14 of the 16 countries.  Respondents rated each brand on the following four criteria: Quality, Excellent Value, Strong Image and Understands Customer Needs.
James Leipnik, Chief of Communication for Canon Europe said: “It is a great achievement to have been awarded the ‘most trusted’ camera brand for the last ten years by readers from all across Europe. At Canon we nurture a passion for the power of image, providing our customers with imaging solutions that empower creativity and innovation. It is rewarding to see that so many readers of the Reader’s Digest continue to trust us to deliver products of the highest quality.”
"Consumer trust is vital to successful brands. Maintaining trust in a fast changing world is one of the biggest challenges facing companies today, especially in the technology sector. For Canon to have maintained its position as the most trusted camera brand in the large majority of countries in Europe is impressive" said Gavin Murray, Regional Advertising Director, Europe, Reader’s Digest.
The 14 countries that selected Canon as the ‘most trusted’ camera brand were Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. 

"Duct tape is like The Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together...."  Carl Zwanzig

No photographer's gadget bag is complete without duct (or Duck) tape. However, carrying those big rolls around can be quite heavy especially if you're a photographer who shoots in the field - wildlife, landscape, macro etc where you don't need a 10m roll of the stuff and where you do need to travel light. It's fine for those photographers confined to the studio or shooting high end commercial work with big lighting rigs, there a roll of duck tape is hardly noticed. For the rest of us, a metre or two is all you'll need, negating the requirements for a big roll.

But how can you carry it easily? Well, for those of you who remember film, I discovered about 8 years ago that a film canister is exactly the same width as a roll of duck tape. All you need to do is wrap 10 or 15 turns around the film canister and hey presto, instant gaffer tape on location.

The real beauty of this though, is that you can still use the film canister to hold other items - blue-tac, paper clips, drawing pins, plasters, antisceptic wipes... whatever you need. And better still, it's waterproof in there as well. In fact, whether you put duck tape on the outside of a film canister or not, it's worth carrying one with some little bits in it anyway - especially the plasters and antisceptic wipes...or maybe that's just me. Duck tape really does have a million and one uses, but no, I won't list them for you! Here's just a few things I've used it for.

* Sticking lens hoods onto lenses to stop them being knocked off
* Sticking flashguns to....well, just about anything
* Fixing broken kit
* Attaching light modifiers to flashguns
* Making random stuff

It seems the CompactFlash card association have been making giants leaps with their new memory card standards. They have just announced the CF 5.0 specification and, well, we just need to hope hard disks keep up as the figures they are talking about are CRAZY.

Ok, so there are no cameras that currently support CF5.0 but when it happens, well, here's some figures to keep you amused.

Currently, CF cards use 28bit addressing, a data transfer unit size of 128KB/se and a maximum capacity of 137GB. CF5.0 gives the following:
48-bit addressing
32MB/sec transfer unit size
144 petabytes of theoretical maximum capacity. Yeah, you read that right. And for those that don't know what a petabyte is, each petabyte is 1,000,000 Gigabytes. so that's 144 million gigabytes in a single compact flash card.

So, you'd best start looking at your hard drive storage now - or maybe just a couple of CF cards will do?! 

If you're of that persuasion and fancy an interesting technical read, here's the latest whitepaper on CF5.0 as a pdf.