Where is the Camera Industry Headed?
2021-08-16 • SEND FEEDBACK | 
Related: computational photography, digital sensor, exposure, frame averaging, golden age of photography, histogram, raw file processing, true raw histogram
Related: computational photography, digital sensor, exposure, frame averaging, golden age of photography, histogram, raw file processing, true raw histogram
re: What Does the Future Hold for a Sony A7R V?
Canon, Sony, Nikon and even Leica/Panasonic all now have mature mirrorless camera systems.
Conventional photographic needs have never been better served gifting us the golden age of photography.
But where does it go from here?
- A true-color sensor is at the top of my list. It would be the single best advance forward in image quality, at least if it could be done without giving up other modern sensor qualities. Heck, I’d be delighted with the noisy old Sigma dp Merrill sensor in full frame with 50 megapixels (RGB each one)—it would blow anything else out of the water for detail/texture.
- Higher megapixels?
- Higher quality via new sensor technology along with computational approaches, frame averaging, smart dark frames, any any area where the camera can choose or improve or a single frame using computational photography.
- Filling in the obvious functionality holes? (like the baffling omission of focus stacking support in Sony mirrorless).
- Incremental gains in autofocus, exposure such as auto-ETTR, and anything where the camera can eliminate technical time-wasters, best-shot selection, etc.
- Differentiation with more cameras offering singular features or form factors?
- 3D, panoramic, stitching support?
All good, but I don’t seen any “killer app” there for the general market.
For me as a landscape photographer, “killer apps” would include:
- Focus stacking support so speedy that inter-frame motion issues happen only rarely, along with a user interface not designed by Klingons. Optional in-camera raw stacking would be awesome, and it’s technically possible.
- Handheld stitching support including alignment dots and grids in real time with audible feedback support so that I can skip the tripod and bang away with the camera using motion sensing and the feedback to make it super easy to get all the frames just right.
- Frame averaging support, so I can have ISO 1 or ISO 5 or ISO 16 quality with the press of a button. Smart support that can detect motion and re-shoot for best results.
- True raw histogram with associated auto-ETTR exposure mode with optimal frame averaging and/or multi-shot high-res mode.
- Pixel shift that can be used most of the time with excellent results and/or repurposed for frame averaging. A smart mode that can frame average within pixel shift in order to suppress issues from mere lighting changes. Or just get rid of pixel shift and use massive computational power to implement a super-smart multi-shot high-res mode.
- 100-megapixel sensor capable of multi-shot high-res mode with 10X the speed and twice the smarts of the already-good Panasonic S1R. The resolution increase can bump up detail capture trivially, but mainly is for eliminating nearly all digital artifacts.
In a nutshell, using the power of computation to reduce the non-creative drudge work of making the image that I envision—computational photography.
I don't understand why Sony/Canon/Nikon are all mostly ignoring this juicy low-hanging fruit.
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