On Sun, 12 Oct 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > REPLY: > > I'm not convinced. In order for the market to go where you predict in less > than five years digital need to offer more than simply "not using film" which is > basically all that there is to digital at present. Mind you, that may be > enough for many but not convincing enough for a wholesale switch to digital. In > addition, digital needs to get a lot cheaper (something I'm sure it will). > Likewise, camera sales doesn't really reflect camera usage or preferences. > Customers are buying what they don't own. For slr's all own film slr's; hardly > anyone > (yet) own a DSLR. > > > Pål > > To my way of thinking, no film is a pretty big advantage. So, just curious, > what else could DSLRs offer? Resolution as good as medium format? What?
Built-in "polaroid back". Being able to see what you are getting as you are shooting is a huge win. In a recent survey of photojournalists as to how digital cameras have changed the profession this feature was the most often referred to advantage of digital over film. Image quality is no longer tied so much to an analogue physical process, so ultimately cameras can be made smaller for the same picture quality. Theoretically, DLRs could offer much better lens performance through technical wizardry in a couple of ways. 1) Lens distortion and abberation can be measured and corrected for mathematically, as is currently done in the "panotools" photoshop plug-in. Given faster in-camera processors there is no reason that in the future this could not be done in the image-processing stage. If the camera can compensate for known lens flaws, lenses could possibly be designed smaller and cheaper by not optically correcting for flaws that can easily be handled in image-processing. 2) Apparently getting a good image on a flat film plane is one of the major difficulties of lens design. Eventually, I can't see any reason why they couldn't make a digital sensor a hemisphere which would make it a lot easier to make better smaller lenses. E-mailing a photo to grandma is a lot easier with a digital original, and burning a CD of a "slide show" is a lot cheaper and easier too. If more people are sharing photos this way rather than in big prints and traditional slide shows, digital is an advantage. DJE
