With Photokina almost upon us and another raft of new cameras due out what would you like to see in a new camera?
There are several technologies being incorporated into the latest cameras, do you want/need any? Are there things you would like to see that camera manufacturers are not doing?
Let us know in the comments.
Here is a list of the selling points of modern cameras to give you some ideas:
- High ISO with low noise (The Nikon D3 pushed the sensitivity rumours are that ISO 25600 is likely to be usable soon)
- Weather sealing
- Built in flash (perhaps with remote control of external flash)
- More mega pixels (Most are at the 10-15MP now, Canon has 21MP and Sony 24MP)
- Live View
- Better Auto Focus (more focus points, better sensitivity, better distribution of points)
- Face recognition
- Large buffer for more shots in a burst
- High burst rate (Entry level DSLR tend to be about 3-4 frames per second, mid range around 6 and top end 8-10)
- Video (the D90 shoots 720p video but only in short bursts and no sound or auto-focus)
- Better dynamic range
- Mirror lock-up
- ISO priority shooting mode
- Built in sensor cleaning
- In body/in lens stabilisation
Ad the list goes on. Let us know what’s important for you.
Hi Mike
My K20D has many of those features already, but the additional features that I would find would help me most are…
High ISO with low noise (or should I say lower noise?)
Better Auto Focus ( not the K20d’s best feature)
Larger buffer for more shots in a burst (great for action shots)
Better dynamic range
Looking at them, I can see that those are the ones that are useful especially in some of our professional work, where we always seem to be working at, or beyond, the limit of what our equipment can do, in lighting that is never adequate, with fast action.
In terms of what I do for club and competition photography, I would be perfectly satisfied with any one of my last 3 cameras!
I was going to add “High burst rate” till I accidentally found that with one press of the shutter button I had recorded 61 photographs of our room in Paris last week….must look that up in the handbook and see what I did!!!!! Took ages to delete them all.
Chris
Wish-list for my next camera:
Something that I badly miss on my digital camera/lens is the depth-of-field scale that used to be marked on the lens barrel of my old film lenses. Modern auto-focus zoom lenses require significantly less rotation to zoom from one end of the lens range to the other (I believe the technical term for this is ‘throw’). This makes it difficult for lens manufacturers to incorporate a DOF scale on the lens barrel.
The outcome of this is that if I want to set the hyperfocal distance accurately, without guessing, I now have to convert my DX focal length into its 35mm equivalent and then enter this value into a DOF calculator on my mobile phone. The whole process takes about 3 minutes, as opposed to 2-3 seconds on my old manual film lens!
I believe that some Canon models have an automatic DOF setting built into the camera’s firmware but my present Nikon D200 has no such feature. I’ll certainly be looking for this on my next camera, alternatively I might take a serious look at going back to manual lenses. Peter.
For members wishing to have a look at a DOF calculator, if only to get a “feel” for depth of field, there’s a useful one at
http://www.dofmaster.com/doftable.html
You can’t take it with you though!
The charts at the following link…
http://www.dofmaster.com/charts.html
could be printed and carried in a camera bag if you don’t have ability to do as Pete does and put it on his mobile phone!