What's next?

WE've had a perios of time when Megapixels was the thing, then we had LiveView as the essential feature, now we seem to be in the Low Noise At High ISO period.....

Anybody care to guess what the next inter-marque battle will be? :

Cheap primes. It has already started. Then most probably FF ?

3d video.
Then Swiss Army and survivor man will issue a hybrid video/still/survival tool handycam.

Eye pupil guided 25 point autofocus. (continuous and single).

Remote live view and control from your smart phone.

Remote storage, pocket wifi SSD.

Broad sampling, image recorded with built-in +/- 1EV bracket extracted with slider and selective area burn/dodge from your chosen tablet PC. I suppose a 1-click mini HDR.

size??

Hopefully price.

It'd be nice for DSLRs to drop in price like pocket cams have.

Dynamic range

yes and ....

there's an extra S to make all the difference.

+1 for dynamic range

Whatever it is there will still be people complaining about it .

Surely that's what keeps the manufacturers on their toes.
If no one complained then nothing would change ...

+ 2. In fact I'm pretty sure I remember Pentax saying a couple of years ago that they thought this was more important than megapixels.

I don't think we've cracked high ISO fully yet. The 12,800 (non-expanded) ISO of the 1D mk IV may seem like a lot but it only allows you to increase your shutter or aperture by 6 points (from ISO 200). It is astounding, but imagine being able to produce noise free pictures in near darkness, at say ISO 1,000,000!

The other thing which could be interesting could be the idea of a transparent sensor. This would mean you could have multiple sensors all at slightly different focus points. You would then be able to take a shot and pick which of the images was in focus (or even combine them into a single image).

Now that would be nice, focus stacking for macro work.

What I mean is that people clamour for something, then complain about it, or moan that something they wanted isn't in the newest model.
Yes it leads to innovation sometimes, but honestly how many people asked for live view before it was first introduced (and I don't mean only by Pentax), or shake reduction, or EVIL?

Mostly it leads to moaning on forums about the fact that Pentax (or Canon or whoever) don't listen to their customers because they haven't included the one thing that person wants. A bit like the on going, yawn making, FF argument. Should Pentax come with an FF camera no doubt there will be complaints about the price - look at how many complaints there are about the price of the K5, which is actually no more expensive than the K7 was at launch and cheaper than the ist D was.

Actually I haven't seen that many complaints about the K-5 price lately .. especially now the camera is starting to roll out and people are getting to see what it can do. I have seen quite a few people saying they will wait until the price has dropped a little and the early adopters have had a play but then that happens with virtually everything.

I think the early complaints were more to do with Nikons D7000 coming out at a price no one expected and it looks like Pentax reacted to that with a lower starting price on the K-5. So there again it would seem that because of Nikon and Pentax users complaining we got a lower initial price.

Anyway ... from reading the thoughts of new K-5 users on the other forum it looks like we could have a decent camera (and I'm not saying all previous models are rubbish by any means).

Could be cheaper though.