You could put the most modern film in your M3 and get the same results as someone shooting with the most advanced electronic everything SLR. The same will not be true comparing the M8 to a consumer level DSLR 5 year from now and that is a promise.
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I suspect this will turn out to be not correct. For the past year or even two, most "advances" in consumer digitals has been churn, rather than real movement. if you have one of the popular Canon or Kodak home snapshot printers (which are really quite good for what they do) or if you take your memory card to a Kodak Kiosk, it quickly becomes evident that it doesn't matter how many megapixels you have, as long as it's more than five, or whether the lens is made by Leica or Kodak -- the pictures look the same. Over the next five years, I expect more churn, like the chrome on a new Pontiac, and slowly falling prices, but not much real improvement.
The M8, on the other hand, while primarily an enthusiast camera, will, I think, shoot photos that are quite adequate for most high-standard magazine journalism even five years from now, because the prints will be better than the printing presses used in the magazines. (But this may not be true with fashion shoots or car shoots or other high-gloss advertising photography which may be printed separately, and which will remain with MF.)
So -- I think the M8 will hold up quite well, because I think the basic functions of digital are now reaching a price/utility plateau.
More interesting to me is the Canon/Nikon question. Where is Canon going? I don't see that it'll really make inroads on MF (in which, five years from now, 33 or 39mp cameras willl be standard, along with big fat juicy pixels and much better software.) In the meantime, if Nikon sticks with the 1.5 format, you'll have a camera that will do everything pj's need, and will be smaller across the board, and cheaper, and, focal-length for focal-length, faster. Will Canon find itself squeezed, rather than Nikon?
JC