Pixel race from Sony and Nikon? How exactly different from Hasselblad and Phase going from 22 MP to how many gazillion they are at now?
I think camera companies sell what they can make that is easier (not easy, easier) to assemble with what they have on hand or can buy off the shelf, hence we have things like more pixels and slowly improving lcds.
If the consumer electronic world, moved like the camera world then your Iphone, would be a motorola brick with a lcd. Maybe 15% smaller and it might take a photo, but other than that it would be based on 15 year old tech.
If you look at any current professional camera, they look and do about the same thing as the film cameras they replaced, except instead of film they have a scanner on the back or inside. It's marvelous they have a scanner, but the rest of the camera and lens, looks and does about the same thing as we've had for about a zillion years and at this stage of digital cameras, they still won't do some things that film cameras did.
Shoot a subject with the sun behind them for that soft dreamy summer look on film, then do it on digital and you'll know what I mean.
Even RED which should be commended for building a camera company from scratch, still build essentially a digital arriflex, or panaflex, or Aaeton. They make a good digital arriflex for a pretty good price, but overall it's still a manual focused camera, that does just about the same thing the film cameras did except instead of processing 4k film you get to process 4k to 5k digital.
Look at Canon and their 5d. They never real built it to be a motion cinema camera for the masses, they built in video because they had live view and they wanted to one up sony which had about the same still camera at the same price point.
It was the masses and a bunch of 3rd party developers that made the 5d2 viable for motion and if you've priced out a complete 5d2 rig that can actually capture sound and mount of a tripod with a usable monitor and a box to read sound bars and collect sound.
In fact the stuff we mount on our 5d2 costs 3 times as much as the camera, which kind of makes you wonder why the camera company didn't make this stuff in the first place and collect the profits.
Anyway.
Somebody asks me what I would like to see in a camera or better put, what do cameras do today that don't let me do what I'd like to do tomorrow.
First make them lighter weight. Something like the Sony FS100 at it's maximum. This allows for lighter weight tripods, mounts, booms, supports and in a world where carbon fiber is everywhere, why are we still lifting up 4 to 20lb cameras.
The other day I drove by a location they were shooting the TV show "House". The camera crane was the size of a Ford F150 pickup, twice the weight, and looked like something that was made for the first world war.
Second make them basic with expandable add ons. In other words if you want a good but limited $5,000 camera, there it is. If you want more, there is more stuff like focus tools, larger capture cards, faster readers, thunderbolt tethering, etc.
Third get rid of the layers and layers of menus. If you've ever worked something like the Panasonic or the Sony fs100 in the heat of battle, you'll find things like changing the shutter speed and building a color look requires the hands of a heart surgeon and the patience of mortgage banker.
Fourth, make all LCD's high def, articulating and touch screen. Hasn't anyone in the camera world ever held an I-phone? Also make it easy to add another screen or two or three. You can't have enough viewing options.
Fifth, allow the camera to shoot a 5k still while it captures motion and make the sensor square with crops lines that light up depending on what format your shooting.
Sixth, make a touch screen follow focus system. Not just touch on one spot and hold it but touch or outline a subject, then let the focus follow that subject.
If this isn't possible, then make an automatic secondary viewfinder, something that looks like a spot meter, and let the assistants, or focus puller focus on the subject while the photographer/camera operator concentrates on the subject and framing.
Seventh, high base iso with internal nd filters to lower the iso. Why do we take a 100 iso camera and bump the curves to get to 1000, or go the other way. Why not just start at 1000 and have a series of nd's to get us lower, or bump the curves or lut to get us higher?
Eighth. Removable AA filters. Kodak did it with their line of digital cameras and I had them and it worked well, it fact it worked amazingly well and since then everybody just forgot about it. How about a series of none to strong and then let us decide which filter is best for the subject.
Ninth. Keep it modular. Really modular so when a new sensor design comes out or a new lcd screen don't make us toss out Ten or twenty grand worth of camera just allow us to insert a new imager or lcd or module or something.
Red is dong something like this, or at least they were, though with RED information changes by the month, so whether anything that fits one a RED One will fit a scarlet, an Epic a scarlet 2 nobody knows, at least nobody but Peter Jackson and the companies owner.
Tenth and the most important . . . software. Whoever writes imaging software must loathe photographers and image makers. Why is it lightroom is 100% different interface than photoshop, C-1 different than lightroom and when you get into motion, Nuke, Color, Di-Vinci (there is a long list) works with nodes and every button is in a different place. That would be fine except 95% of the buttons and commands do the same thing so why make them a 100% different function . . . and nodes, I want to meet the person that thought that up, because it's the craziest thing I've ever used.
I loathe learning new software and before somebody says you can't do motion with still software or your can't do stills with motion software that's bull. CS5 Extended will do motion (though it's a pain), Nuke will do resolution free stills (though it's a pain to learn), so why it takes 4 software suites just to color imagery makes no sense to me.
That's the short list.
IMO
BC
