Read the Writing on the Wall!

It is not impossible to tell what is about to happen in the camera hardware area of digital imaging. Nikon has just thrown out a teaser about its new 10.2 megapixel camera that will probably be tagged something like D70X (x for extrapixel), and Sandisk who already had the some of the fastest cards on the market has upped its speed as well with the new EXTREME IV.

What does all this mean you ask? Well it means the bar is about to be raised yet again. In the megapixel war, it has been pretty much tit-for-tat between Nikon and Canon since the war began. Recent figures show that pound-for-pound, Nikon has held onto significant market share which you would think a behemoth like Canon would have already swallowed whole.

Despite the early problems with the Nikon D200, Nikon seems to have made good for people with problems and kept the bad publicity off the front pages in reference to D200 firmware problems, sensors with blown pixels and continuing supply problems with the D200.

Canon continues to wade through problems of its own with little press or class actions. Take the 20D for example; a revolutionary camera when it came out which has documented problems with focusing. Whoops, great camera just can't get anything in focus! Again, whether by design or the overwhelming number and rapidity of new camera models brought out to supersede the 20D, they dodged bad publicity on this one too.

What Canon lacks as a company is FOCUS. Too many sensor sizes and too rapid camera upgrades has fickled a consumer, if they are a die-hard Canon user, who has been preconditioned to wait for the next great thing.

So, what is the next great thing? Well, you can expect a jump (either announced or rolled out) to 22 megapixel camera sensors at the high end of all DSLR cameras in the next two months.

What does this mean for the average shooter? Well, again the camera you just bought has depreciated like a YUGO, so leveraging the sale of that into a new Porsche is impossible at best. If you are teetering on whether to sell gear - now is the time. When you have the cheaper cameras now at your (expensive camera's) megapixel range, and higher models replacing your camera - PUNT! (Hold onto your Hasselblad film cameras though as word on the street is they will cease production at the end of the year.)

What this all really means is we are about to enter a new era of digital SLR camera production. With a new upper end of 22 megapixels, there is no need to go any higher for quite some time. This kind of resolution is equivalent to medium format film. Very few consumers will see the need to even go to 22 meg., and professionals will be quite satisfied with 22 and smaller sensors (ala NIKON). This new era should see a truce in the megapixel war, and a new focus on ... cameras that focus, cameras that work differently from anything we now use (take a look at Sony), a true revolution in the way cameras look, work and feel.

Remember, we are in the first five minutes of a 100 year revolution. There is absolutely no reason professional DSLR's should look like our old 35-millimeter cameras. NONE! The only reason they do is that camera manufacturers are scared of a revolution and comfortable with evolution. How many times do reviewers tout "looks and feels like my 35mm..." bla bla? Or, "looks and feels like a real ..."? That is exactly the wrong signal sent and received by the manufacturers. We need manufacturers to now concentrate on cameras that look, feel and most importantly WORK like nothing we have ever seen or held in our hands before. Let the Golden Age begin!