Digital Cameras of the Future
Everybody's got their own predictions about the future and there seems to be no downside to being completely wrong. The upside of guessing correctly is to have a 'Visionary' status in the field. This set of predictions is limited to Digital Cameras (no "Robots will do all our dishes and laundry for us by 2010" for example). I've left out fairly obvious predictions like cameras having even more megapixels and costing less each passing year. That's probably true of TV sets and laptops as well.
Tremendous Dynamic range. Sensors of the future will be able to exposure-compensate pixel by pixel and it will become possible to get in-camera results that now require either ND filters or double exposures that need digital blending.
GPS. Basic GPS receivers will be a standard feature on high-end DSLRs. Once this info is embedded as metadata into EXIF, image browsers will be able to do a quick database lookup and tell that a picture was taken in "San Francisco, California" or "Hyderabad, India". And once search engines like Google and operating systems like Windows XP become capable of searching through EXIF data, then finding images from "Keystone, South Dakota" will be much, much easier than having to depend on photographers remembering to label the geographic location of each of their photographs.
Massive in-built storage. Today's (April 2004) top-of-the-line DSLR is the Canon EOS-1Ds which costs about $7000. At the same time, Apple's iPOD costs $300 and has a 15GB drive. These two are just crying out to be married to each other. After all, what's the difference between $7000 and $7300?
Canon will rule. It used to be that Kodak and Fuji fought the film emulsion wars, Canon and Nikon the bodies and lenses wars and Epson and HP the printer wars. With the assault of digital cameras, things don't look very peachy for Kodak or Fuji. The outlook for film labs is also dim with more and more people likely to print at home. But who's going to win? It seems like the company that has offerings for the camera lens, the camera body, the photo printer, the printer inks and the photo paper will dominate. No one competes in all five segments, except - Canon.
1. On Wednesday, 29-Nov-2006 Hayley said
hey i came to youe site i really need some pics it would be helpful............
2. On Friday, 06-Oct-2006 Tariel said
The info is out of date
but the ideas is good
3. On Monday, 25-Sep-2006 kelly said
your site didn't help to tell me how long cameras are going to be around for at all.
4. On Saturday, 27-May-2006 ...Tala... said
hey dude i was doin a project n ur view on ipod n canon hookin up realli helped thanx heaps!
5. On Thursday, 27-Apr-2006 bex said
thanx so much im doin a last minute asignment and ur website helped me... thank you sooooooooooo much!!!
6. On Wednesday, 26-Apr-2006 michelle said
i am doing a class prgect and i really need some pic.
7. On Friday, 07-Apr-2006 Andy said
same here...your info was really helpful
8. On Wednesday, 29-Mar-2006 Suzie said
......okayyyy.......I'm doing a project, your contributions of advice or something like that has been rather helpful. Thankies.