Herbert Keppler's take on today's digital SLR issues: http://www.photoreporter.com/2002/08-15/features/the_way_it_is.html
The Way It Is Photokina 2002: New Day Dawning for Digital SLRs? Herbert Keppler Did it ever occur to you that there was something mighty peculiar about the disparity in size between the interchangeable lens digital SLRs and most of the point-and-shoot digital cameras? Many point-and-shoot digitals are miniature marvels. Why aren't digital SLRs? After all, digital interchangeable lens SLRs are freed from all the wind and rewind gearing that are an absolute necessity with 35mm SLRs. With the possibility of electronic viewfinders, pentaprisms should vanish along with the need for rapid return mirrors. In the Beginning So why are the interchangeable lens digital SLRs as big and heavy or maybe more so than their 35mm predecessors? (Ooh, film burning photographers aren' t going to like that word, predecessors. Let's call them sister cameras.) The major part of the answer, of course, is that every interchangeable lens digital SLR camera body and lens mount started life as either a Canon or Nikon 35mm SLR-and that includes the Fuji and Kodak digital SLRs too. Just pick up any one of these cameras, look through the viewfinder and you can instantly identify what 35mm SLR camera brand and model formed its optical and mechanical base. Well, using already available 35mm SLR shells, autofocusing and lens aperture stop-down systems are ways to keep R&D plus engineering costs down while electronics engineers concentrate on the sensors, chips, boards and LCD panels necessary for digital interchangeable lens SLRs. Why no Minolta or Pentax interchangeable lens digital SLRs? Because as good as Minolta and Pentax lenses are, their lens systems are inadequate in variety to satisfy the pros and advanced amateurs camera makers see as the prime customers. The incredible scopes of the Canon and Nikon lens systems are indeed prime reasons for every electronic camera to use them. Virtually all present and many past Canon and Nikon lenses plus those from independent lens makers can and will fit the new breed of digital SLRs. Bigger Doesn't Mean Better Prices of successive digital SLRs keep falling as the pixel counts climb. How wonderful-at least for consumers who care little that camera makers are producing an unbelievable number of digital cameras but are making little or no profit due to the short life span of the cameras and cut-throat prices. Not so wonderful: The whole concept of today's interchangeable lens digital SLRs has an Achilles heel. All 35mm SLR camera lenses have been designed to cover a 24x36mm film format. So not surprisingly the electronics engineers have been hard at work trying to produce high megapixel, moderate cost 24x36mm CMOS or CCD digital sensors to take full advantage of the 24x36mm coverage. But is such a large sensor really needed at all? Nikon and Canon have found that their considerably smaller format sensors can produce pro quality results to six megapixels and probably beyond. In other words, unlike film, the bigger sensor area does not necessarily produce needed higher resolution. You might say that in every 24x36mm capable Canon, Fuji, Kodak or Nikon digital camera body is a smaller digital sensor wanting to break out. A smaller sensor covering a narrower view means that the equivalent 35mm camera focal length of every lens is, in effect, increased when attached to a digital camera just as it would be if you were shooting on smaller-than-35mm film. For instance, with a Canon EOS D30, you must multiply the marked focal length by 1.6, with the Nikon D1x and Fuji FinePix S1 Pro by 1.5, and with the Kodak DCS 760 by 1.3. While telephoto lens users may be delighted with a 300mm f/2.8 that becomes a 450mm lens as if by magic, a wide-angle lens owner must buy a big and very expensive 14mm lens to get the equivalent of a 21mm lens on a 35mm SLR. And he can get no shorter focal length. A photographer happy using a 28-105mm zoom on a 35mm camera may not be so delighted when it is transformed into a 42-157.5mm lens. The Achilles Heel But wait, we haven't hit the real Achilles heel yet. Lens designers predict that they will in the future be able to produce shorter focal length lenses than 14mm for digital use only. Now the heel. Since all these cameras have sensors covering a far smaller area than the 24x36mm capability of the rest of the Nikon and Canon lens lines, isn't this a frightening waste of covering power? If lenses only need to cover a smaller sensor area, couldn't the lenses be made far smaller and lighter with larger apertures and zooms have incredibly greater focal-length ratios? Theoretically at least, it would be possible for Nikon and Canon to produce a new series of such lenses for their present Canon and Nikon cameras, but this would be like wedding a new lens system onto old 35mm camera body technology. Olympus Steps Up Be there a camera manufacturer so gutsy-or perhaps foolhardy-as to scrap all old AF SLR interchangeable lens technologies and create from the ground up a small, light, new design digital SLR with a brand new lens system? Yes, Olympus. If that company's plans work out, and its own and the Japanese financial situation and economy allow, Olympus expects to show the new system at this year's Photokina. It's based on a 4/3-inch CCD sensor. Just what I predicted: a smaller SLR camera body and smaller, lighter lenses having vastly greater zoom ranges are promised by Olympus. While Olympus has had much experience in the past with the discontinued OM camera's interchangeable lens system and knows its way around high precision optics, thanks to its designs for microscope and other scientific optics, the Olympus designers will be starting from optical scratch with the new lens system. A full line of lenses is promised, from extreme wide angle to zooms and teles. However, since it would be nearly impossible to satisfy all lens requirements, Olympus has already asked other camera and lens makers to produce lenses in the new mount to fill the gaps. It's not clear whether Olympus expects others to make cameras in the Olympus camera format as well and whether royalty arrangements would be needed for the lenses. While eventually a series of digital SLRs, suitable for beginner to professional, is planned, we expect the first camera to be at the same price and user level as the Nikon D100. If Olympus designs a truly sensational digital SLR system and can have or furnish in a reasonable time just as remarkable a lens system, what will happen to the popularity of today's ZLRs (non-interchangeable lens digital SLRs) whose lens systems don't provide anything wider than 28mm or longer than somewhere in the 250mm range? And will consumers regard the present crop of digital SLR systems and lenses based on 35mm bodies as unwieldy, lumbering dinosaurs in comparison? Small, highly flexible and convenient digital SLRs and lenses could bring us a new SLR renaissance. Or will the new Olympus system, if refused the asked-for help and support from other manufacturers, suffer the same fate as the tiny half-frame 35mm Olympus Pen F SLR system that vanished in the early 1970s?
