Crystal Ball Gazing
The Age
Thursday January 17, 2008
Terry Lane casts an eye at the year ahead in search of camera trends.
IMAGING went to the zoo last week to try a new single-lens reflex with a film-equivalent 300 mm lens. The tigers - parents and three handsome adolescents - are extraordinarily photogenic. We came away with a memory card full of cats, apes and one emu having a bad hair day.However, we were amazed by how many fellow gawkers were taking pictures with their phones. Given that these devices have wide-angle, fixed focal length, fixed aperture lenses, they are not ideal for the job.We also wondered what they intended to do with their snaps. But then we saw one woman taking a picture of her offspring sitting on the elephant statue and saying: "I'll send this one to dad right away."This year could well be the year when the ubiquitous phone camera displaces the discrete unit. Last year Nokia was already boasting that it was the world's biggest camera maker. It said that it had sold about 140 million camera phones in 2006.So what are people doing with their camera phones? Do they make prints from the image files? Glynn Lavender, retail operations manager at Camera House, says that almost no one prints from phones. Even though the latest have Bluetooth transmitters and the shop kiosks are fitted with receivers, they hardly ever have customers making prints. Telephone photos are not becoming part of the national informal private archive.There should be advances this year in phone camera technology. We hope that this means better optics and not simply more pixels. Two megapixels is more than enough for the tiny sensors built into phones - any more and the picture will be degraded, not improved.Because there was so much activity last year in the SLR part of the business - with new products from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus and Panasonic - we don't expect anything startlingly new for this year, although we do expect prices to drop. Pentax and Nikon have set entry-level benchmarks with their excellent K100D Super and Nikon D40 respectively.In compact cameras we are pessimistic. Last year there was an outbreak of pixel madness that has resulted in some serious image degradation in the most expensive compacts. Now we have the paradox of the cheaper cameras being better buys than the most expensive. We have had to forswear our own golden rule that you get what you pay for in digital cameras. Sometimes you don't! What we would really like to see in the coming year is some maker with the courage to produce a compact with a decent-sized sensor. Olympus and Panasonic are the obvious starters with their Four Thirds sensors that are smaller than those used by Canon, Nikon, et al in their SLRs. A 10-megapixel Four Thirds sensor in a top-quality compact would be a winner.Finally, a correction to our review of the Kodak Easyshare 5300 multifunction unit. It came to us with packets of studio gloss paper, which is really dimpled semi-gloss. We asked for true gloss and were sent more studio gloss. We made a reasonable assumption, but in fact there is a fine Kodak paper called Kodak Ultra High Gloss. Now you know. Gloss doesn't always mean gloss.
© 2008 The Age