On Wed, May 23, 2007 at 08:47:24AM -0600, Tom C wrote: > > Who knows what advancements could be made in digital picture technology in 5 > - 10 years? > > Tom C.
Well, we don't know, but I should think we could make a pretty good guess. Digital cameras have been around that long, and digital imaging has been around significantly longer. The last four or five years (roughly the amount of time Pentax have been in the game) have been mostly evolutionary - pixel density has climbed, and image quality has improved, but the digital cameras of today look and work pretty much identically to those of five years ago. The only revolutionary changes in hardware that have come along since the start of the colour digital camera era are the Bayer sensor (who remembers those old three-sensor cameras?), the Foveon sensor (which looks as though it might be a technological dead end), and perhaps the research that Pat Hanrahan's group are doing over at Stanford on a camera that captures more than just a single plane of focus. It's a little early to tell, but I suspect the tradeoff in lower resolution may relegate this to little more than an interesting experiment. Most of the other advances have been made in image processing, or in ergonomics. I can still take photographs with my *ist D, and for most of what I do it's more than good enough. It's not as convenient to use as the K10D (for a variety of reasons), but it does still work. And I can take the resulting images and process them using all the latest software. Over the next five or ten years I expect to see the same pattern continue. I don't expect a revolutionary change in camera design. Perhaps we'll see larger sensors increase their share of the market place. Perhaps we'll see a good electronic shutter and viewfinder, which will remove the need for the mirror and focal plane shutter. I'm sure we'll see sensors which work better at higher ISOs, but fortunately for me that's not a significant fraction of what I do. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
