oh well ...
:mouth wide shut:
Haplo,
You seem astonished that I agree with you. One can be crazy but lucid.
LL MF zone seems to be where all the divas and spoilt kids come; this where people *need* a 30ft limo with a built-in swimming pool.
P1 aka Leaf have played this audience like a violin, so you have 80MP backs and 60MP backs and 39 MP backs 30MP backs even old 20 and 16MP used backs, and color and monochrome and IR, and all variety of sizes and Phase label and Leaf label and then Phammy and Contax and V and Hy6 mount, some of those cameras which work great but haven't been in production since Elvis went out to buy cigarettes. Of course people who "need" all this "choice" are ready to pay as much as a rockstar for his next guitar.
And all of this for an audience of what? 1000 sales a year? 2000? It seems P1 have 300 employees. You work out how the shark needs to keep swimming to stay alive.
So now I look at this with the eyes of an EE, and I see that the main technology, CCD, which has driven all this limousine-extension business, is now basically as admirable and obsolete as the SR71 and the Space Shuttle. Which in fact is to be expected since it is declassified military and remote sensing technology of the 70s and 80s. So one shouldn't expect many more novel CCD chips to get designed or in fact made. But it is great that you can get it, because you certainly paid for it. Wikipedia tells me the going price of an electro-optical keyhole viewer was equivalent to that of a Nimitz, in the high 10 figure range. I guess scientists should be happy Nasa finally managed to get one Hubble to look out, after launching a whole bunch of them that aimed their mirrors and CCDs downwards.
Yes, CCD is a great technology. Yes it's going away. Except for the military who can afford to make it work, consumer imagery is now overwhelmingly going to be CMOS with onboard ADC. Yes, if I had a Strad, or a Louis Lot flute I would keep it and play it every day. Yes, I may be over 50 but I won't do a dead design. So, yes, the best thing to do is to start prototyping and wait for what my professors called "le rendez vous téchnologique", the moment when the new tech hits the market and everything changes, to arrive. Thank you for giving me an opportunity to share.
Edmund
PS. I spoke yesterday to a company that is starting to prototype flexible plastic sheet sensors, and they expect to be in production in a few years, with large sheets, albeit with a low resolution. I think chances are we might bring back 8x10 within my working life.
