So where's it all going to...

[wibbly]

- More mega-pixels

- IS built into the camera body

- Selection of focus/metering points by monitoring eye movement in the viewfinder

- Loss of SLR mirror (EVF, and non-contrast based focusing)

- 35x24 sensors in all cameras. The larger area may well end up the most cost effective way of getting pixel counts higher on prosumer SLRs - and whatever its merits, playing the [pixel] numbers game is something that can't be avoided. It's like MHz on PCs. :-(

- 25fps(?) rates good for (short) movies (!)

- differing exposure across the sensor (a kind of electronic shutter on steriods). Might give a lot more flexibility than in-camera curves. Would require a lot more intelligence to work out what to expose how.

- More compact "lenses". Bend the lenses [change their shape under software control] to get super wide zoom ranges

....?

W

[blacktape]

- 35x24 sensors in all cameras. The larger area may well end up the most cost effective way of getting pixel counts higher on prosumer SLRs - and whatever its merits, playing the [pixel] numbers game is something that can't be avoided. It's like MHz on PCs.

11 Megapixel 1Ds is awesome. So is 22 Megapixel Leaf. Should see it for yourself.

I never shot landscape on 35mm until I get the 1Ds. Awesome amount of detail.

[taskerc]

New Konica Minolta dSLR is reputed to have in-body IS on its upcoming debut.

[DocFrankenstein]

- 25fps(?) rates good for (short) movies (!)

:lol: :lol: :lol:

Why short? The hard drives are keeping up no problem. :P

[Jon]

- 25fps(?) rates good for (short) movies (!)

:lol: :lol: :lol:

Why short? The hard drives are keeping up no problem. :P

An hour of DVD-quality video (and that's still NTSC, not HDTV resolution) will bust 4 GB. Can't take an awful lot of stills with that.

[Jesper]

- More mega-pixels
We can never have enough megapixels.... :)

- IS built into the camera body
The Minolta Dynaxx 7D is the first DSLR to have this, we yet have to see how well it works - if it's really as good as IS in the lens.

- Selection of focus/metering points by monitoring eye movement in the viewfinder
This is not new, the older EOS 3 and other Canon cameras have this. There is no Canon DSLR with eye-controlled AF selection (yet).

- Loss of SLR mirror (EVF, and non-contrast based focusing)
Yuck! I don't want an EVF! Electronic viewfinders are useless for manual focussing and never show what you see through the lens as sharp and natural as optical viewfinders. Please no EVF in my digital camera.

- 35x24 sensors in all cameras. The larger area may well end up the most cost effective way of getting pixel counts higher on prosumer SLRs - and whatever its merits, playing the [pixel] numbers game is something that can't be avoided. It's like MHz on PCs. :-(
At the moment, the large sensor size is what makes the 1Ds and 1Ds Mark II so expensive. It's just very difficult and expensive to make such large silicon chips without errors on them. Technology may improve in the future, but since even Canon now makes EF-S lenses specially designed for APS-sized sensors, I'd expect that it will take at least 5 years, probably longer, before 36x24mm sensors will become available in affordable cameras. People should accept the APS sensor size as a format of its own instead of constantly comparing it with old film technology....

- 25fps(?) rates good for (short) movies (!)
No doubt that cameras will become even faster than the 1D Mark II in the future.

- differing exposure across the sensor (a kind of electronic shutter on steriods). Might give a lot more flexibility than in-camera curves. Would require a lot more intelligence to work out what to expose how.
Who knows what smart tricks the manufacturers may come up with. I wonder how you would meter when you'd have a camera with a feature like that.

- More compact "lenses". Bend the lenses [change their shape under software control] to get super wide zoom ranges
I don't doubt that there will be interesting technological advances in lenses as well in the future.

[wibbly]

- Selection of focus/metering points by monitoring eye movement in the viewfinder
This is not new, the older EOS 3 and other Canon cameras have this. There is no Canon DSLR with eye-controlled AF selection (yet).

How well does it work?

W

[Jesper]

- Selection of focus/metering points by monitoring eye movement in the viewfinder
This is not new, the older EOS 3 and other Canon cameras have this. There is no Canon DSLR with eye-controlled AF selection (yet).

How well does it work?

I have an EOS 30 (Elan 7E). I haven't used it a lot since I got my 10D, but when I did I used ECF all the time - I found it really fast and easy to use. Before you can use it, you have to "train" the camera for your specific eye; the camera has a special training mode for that. I wonder why Canon hasn't yet implemented it in any of their DSLRs.

[BearSummer]

Hi Folks,

way back when (1992) canon brought out the EOS a2/a2e/5 which had Eye controlled focus (ECF). You had 5 horizontal points you could look at and a 6th in the top left corner for DOF preview. I had two 5's and they rocked. When the EOS3 came out I upgraded to that as it has an oval that covers about 60% of the screen and has 45 points that you can pick by eye. Once you have trained the camera and yourself to use ECF it worked fine, wasn't so good for people with glasses but for naked eyes it was pretty good.

Was hoping that they would build it into one of the 1 series digitals but I'm still waiting. I gues that not enough people have used it or liked it enough to create a fuss. I like the function so much that I didn't buy the EOS 1v when it came out (got the 3's instead) because it didn't have it, so for me it was a show stopper.

With regards to "where will it go", when the 1Ds was released and we became aware of how hard it is on lenses I said that 15-20Mb would probably be the limit for chips purely down to lens design. Unless they can find a way of making better lenses I cant see them pushing much beyond 20Mb. The next step could be to go the foevon (s) chip route where you read each colour from each site rather than using the bayer overlay. The other option is to make a new range of lenses where you aren't trying to have fast, sharp, low CA all in the same lens, I can see them producing slower lenses that are sharper and have lower CA. I can see a time when fast lenses are something of a specialised requirement and all you do is shoot at a higher iso with better noise reduction rather than shoot with faster lenses. Yes I know, no more shallow DOF, but how many of you shoot with lenses faster than 2.8 now, and of those how many shoot wide open?

Here's something for the future, small supplementary lenses that are used to give you a z coordinate for your image using paralax therfore allowing you to differentially blur your image depending on distance from your camera. Ok thats enough wild speculation... give it 20 years and we will see (huge grin)

Best regards

BearSummer

[ron chappel]

- More mega-pixels

Mp count will soon top out.There is only so many pixels we need and ever smaller pixel sites make more noise.

- - IS built into the camera body This is the next big thing!!!! I want a camera with this! :D

- - Selection of focus/metering points by monitoring eye movement in the viewfinder Crude ones don't work very well(eos5,50e) average systems are not very popular either(eos 30).It's only the eos 3 with it's huge number of focus points that makes it a worthwhile thing to have.

- - Loss of SLR mirror (EVF, and non-contrast based focusing)
Loss of mirror..maybe.
Contrast based focus is here to stay though.The best way to improve it is to add active ifrared distance calculation for near distances as some digicams have (i'm not sure 'active infrared' is the right phrase for it though)

- - 35x24 sensors in all cameras. The larger area may well end up the most cost effective way of getting pixel counts higher on prosumer SLRs - and whatever its merits, playing the [pixel] numbers game is something that can't be avoided. It's like MHz on PCs. :-(

Little chance,if ever.Better to keep the APS style sensor size and use the extra image circle for something truly usefull-in body image stabilization :D

- - 25fps(?) rates good for (short) movies (!)

LOL could be 8) .I have heard of someone shooting a short film on a leica R8 body with motordrive :lol:

- - differing exposure across the sensor (a kind of electronic shutter on steriods). Might give a lot more flexibility than in-camera curves. Would require a lot more intelligence to work out what to expose how.

They've done this on digicams allready and nikon have something like it on their latest pro body.Could turn out to be very good!

- - More compact "lenses". Bend the lenses [change their shape under software control] to get super wide zoom ranges

Veeeeery difficult to do acurately.They have such lenses in development but they are way too small (nad way to crude)for DSLR's,being currently only several mm across.There are small (and some large)developments coming all the time with lenses so we can continue to expect a long term gradual cost reductions/image quality improvements