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Designing the supporting electronics is not child's play. Electronic design for a CCD based camera with good image quality is hard. With modern CMOS the sensor itself is doing all the hard work. Even simple CCD based camera probably needs a display and histograms, so some significant computer programming is needed.
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I assume that Canon and Nikon have a large amount of software developers doing all kinds of stuff. They need a smooth, user-friendly, (semi-) cross-platform software base that they can sell in the millions. This means support for quirky languages, country-specific tax laws, being able to run on the very cheapest processor etc.
The camera dreamed of here would be a very different kind of beast, I think. More like a industrial camera featuring some generic embedded x86/arm platform, a large battery/fan(?), running linux and relying upon general open-source components to do as much as possible. If you aim to sell <1000 cameras (at a hefty price and, hopefully, large profit), you make sure that fixed spending is kept low, even if that means per-unit spending increase.
I am not so sure that there is so much "significant programming" before one could have a product that some might consider purchasing. But aiming for a more polished, complex, user-friendly product means spending ever more resources (development, study-groups etc) on software and mechanical design for ever smaller returns. Canikon probably have refined that game to a form of art, and you would need some serious funding to beat them at their own game (especially now that the camera market seems to struggle).
I assume that the camera itself would have only basic exposure controls and readout of histogram, perhaps a crude LCD preview. The main output would be raw files that are developed by e.g. open-source raw development software that is not maintained by the camera developers. This raw development software might be offline, realtime-connected to the camera (on your computer/tablet) or even run locally in the camera.
Or an off-the-shelf tablet could be an integrated part of the product, ensuring that the camera would only have to have basic sensor supporting electronics and the capability to transmit digitized image data to the tablet. Subsequently, user-interaction and image processing could be implemented using high-level languages, libraries and UI familiarity offered on tablets, where there is a large pool of talented developers familiar with the tools.
Examples:
A medical ultrasound probe that connects to your smartphone:
http://www.mobisante.com/products/product-overview/A digital stomp-box developed (according to the myth) by one guy in a couple of years, beating competitors on a highly specific audio dsp task:
http://www.neo-instruments.de/en/ventilator/ventilator-overviewNow, none of these address the specific challenge of integrating sensors and camera mechanics in a good way. That would be problems to be solved by competent people in such a project. But I guess the general task of integrating such an effort in a box with some user interaction can be done with moderate time spent.
-h