Toronto Photography Meetup Group

from what I read on various forums that feature had mixed reviews, some liking it, some hating it.
It is possible it generated so many support calls that Canon decided it's not worth it.

How about ditching the Bayer pattern in sensors?

Whatever happened to Kodak's new sensor design that was supposed to increase sensitivity to light 2-4x by adding clear pixels (rather than pixels with a red, green, or blue filter in front of them to the pattern)?

This would reduce the amount of high ISO needed and also the noise (especially in CMOS sensors, and instead CCD sensors can used again which are inherently less noisy to begin with).

The original Kodak press release:
http://www.kodak.com/eknec/PageQuerier.jhtml?pq-path=2709&pq-locale=en_US&gpcid=0900688a80720f9d

I have the Canon Elan with eye tracking it does work for me but you have to be very deliberate on where you look. For the type of shooting I do single point focus with recompose works 90% of the time.

I'm still waiting for the full frame race. Where there are Full Frame Cameras in the $1000 ranges.

I also see that there is a need for a higher Dynamic range as others have said.

Some are say the days of the shutter are dwindling since 4/3 is starting to boom....

I'd like to see a camera that is not a throwaway and we can buy sensor cartridges. for upgrades. We could have HI-RES ones for studio and low light ones and different sensors for different uses.

There is always innovation.

http://www.red.com/epic_scarlet/

not in the $1000 price range though.

I think something as simple as a gps within the body would be awsome to record exact location where the shot was taken...record it on the card along with all the settings...

While it is true that the technical specifications are at a point where one is almost never left wanting, I can still use even higher sensitivity, lower noise, faster and more accurate and more reliable AF, and more dynamic range. I can comfortably shoot up to ISO 6400 on my D700's, knowing that I still get acceptable results even after pushing it a full stop. With the D3S, I could go to ISO 25600 and be happy. Yet I still occasionally find myself wanting to shoot a dark scene at 1/200 s and f/8 to freeze motion and get more DoF... but doing so would require a clean ISO 204800 setting!

And what good is shooting in low light, low contrast situations if the camera cannot AF and it is too dark to manually focus? I almost always have my camera on continuous AF, but then that means I can't use the AF assist lamp. I may not want a distracting red pattern beamed at my subjects either. I would love an AF system that can focus on skin texture and tone at, say, -5 EV light levels.

But aside from all that, there are many other areas of improvement that don't simply deal with numeric specifications. One of the things that still drives me nuts these days is telling the camera where you want it to AF. Due to various technical limitations, I tend to only use the center AF point. I'll focus-and-recompose, pre-focus, zone focus, etc. to get the shot I want, but that means taking my attention away from the subject.

The Canon 7D is a great example of improvements that can be made. It may not have the fastest AF around or the most AF points, etc. but it has some nifty features that make the AF system easier to use. You can select an AF zone rather than one AF point vs all AF points; it doesn't have to be all or nothing. It remembers which AF point was selected depending on the orientation of the camera (great for always having the AF point in the top center of the frame!). It can memorize specific AF point and mode settings, allowing you to instantly return to them with the press of a button.

Auto ISO is another example of improved functionality. Even if your camera only goes to ISO 3200, being able to treat ISO as another exposure variable like aperture or shutter speed can be very handy. Auto ISO on the D700 is already pretty nice, but I would love to see a feature where the lowest shutter speed is not a fixed value, but one that automatically changes based on the focal length of the lens. Right now, I have to dig through the menu system to change the Auto ISO shutter speed. It would be awesome if the camera automatically varied it from, say, 1/70 s to 1/200 s when shooting with a 70-200mm lens.

There are several other features I would love, but I don't think we'll be getting any time soon. Imagine if you could specify a range of ISO values in a single shot. Why must the entire frame be recorded at a single ISO setting? That's a film limitation! Why not capture a beautiful landscape where the bright sky region is at ISO 100, while the darker foreground detail is captured at ISO 400? It could act like a digital ND gradient filter, but at the pixel level.

How about a 35mm SLR body with a 36mm x 36mm square sensor? The lens already projects a round image circle, so why not make the most of it? Now you never have to worry about horizontal vs vertical, flash brackets, vertical grips, etc. Why should the MF guys have all the fun?

You can never have too many megapixels, or a big enough zoom.

I am excited to see what can happen with the sub-DSLR segment. What are they calling them these days? EVIL? Stuff like the Sony NEX, and the micro 4/3rds bodies, are exciting. I want something with the power of a DSLR that I truly could carry everywhere.

I want macro focus down to 3 mm.

My two hobbies are aquariums and photography, and both seem to attract gear-heads. I'm a computer geek too. Sense a theme?

W

But it's not as easy to just replace the sensor (never mind a system of getting it into alignment; some people can't put a CF card into a camera without bending the pins).

The problem is if you replace the sensor you'd have to replace most of the electronics in the camera as well.

To use an example say you own a 286, and you want to replace the processor with the latest one...you can't just plug in the new processor so you have to get a new motherboard, and you can't use the old MFM hard drives on the new motherboard so you have to replace them too...and the power supply won't plug in so that needs replacing...and then you find out your new motherboard won't fit in your old case so you need an all new case.

It's the same with replacing the sensor...more megapixels, you need a new A to D converter, you need new processor to handle the wider data width, probably new ram, and the firmware is useless so that needs upgrading too. After all that it's cheaper to buy a whole new camera.

And before someone mentions medium format and digital backs, in those cases you ARE replacing most of the electronics when you change backs.

Yeah I understand. It would probably not be Just a sensor but a fair bit of electronics and logic too. Again this is becoming a wish list kind of post. But something like this would allow sensor development to be come more specialized. Now you could move away from a jack of all trades sensor and move into more specialized fields.

Remember that in the analog world you could replace film and get whole new characteristics? And film was fiddly and and and... But Film is still around for that reason. Film had characteristics you could change on the fly. Some was sensitive and some not so much.

The fps race will never end in my opinion. You probably won't see it with a mechanical mirror and shutter, but what about 30 fps image capture. you could resize the images down to 1080p for video use or use one frame as it's 10-20 MP image.

ECF, like Minolta's EyeStart AF, was a nifty gimmick that didn't work well in practice. Additionally it required using a fixed diopter on the viewfinder.

I do not expect it to return anytime soon. There's a reason it hasn't shown up on any body since the Elan 7Ne and has only appeared on one high-end body (the EOS 3).

The 90's were full of gimmicky tech that didn't pan out. Power Zoom (and its features like zoom tracking), ECF and Eye Start AF, expansion cards, panorama modes...