I like my cameras pretty much the way they are. I would like to see a camera (maybe a snapshot camera) that would allow for emailing right from the camera. Right now the revolution seems to be in sharing images.

Good topic. very interesting discussion.

It is not that easy. Still pictures from human eye would not be so great. Human eye has clear sight only where it looks. Dynamics is great only because of adaptation… not in one single frame.

Scanner cameras could do that thing much better.

- Dynamic range high enough to allow complete freedom of shutter speed and aperture, while also eliminating ISO.
- SLRs with “true live view” in a viewfinder or on a viewscreen with the same resolution as an optical TTL viewfinder. This means something like a 4″ LCD with a 6 megapixel resolution.
- The above paves the way for 60 fps SLRs.
- Useful real time wireless data transfer.
- Broad spectrum recording devices, IR to UV (or even beyond).
- Terabyte storage devices.
- Foveon recording devices defeating Bayer interpolated devices.

For the revolutionary things I’d like to add my view:

- Electrically deformable lens elements.

“but with the T-max, just as with digital photography, the picture quality suffers so badly that it’s hardly worth doing unless you like the grain for effect.”

I think that my Canon 5D at ISO 1600 is much better than any ISO 1600 film that I have ever seen. It seems that Canons new 1D mark III has even better ISO noise ratio with smaller sensor.

There is few ISO 1600 shot in 1D mark III:
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1332/712664522_bd5441c083_b.jpg
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1240/712001245_068a03b001_b.jpg

I think we have not seen the last of this ISO race, which has just begun.

Even more extended dynamic range would be also contribure something new.

p.s.: I also agree that high-def high-iso coupling is a very interesting point

You know what was the first thing that popped into my head reading this sentence? The OLPC (One Laptop per Child) project.

Can you imagine the strength of that paired with a One Camera per Child? An entire generation of children, learning to observe, create images, and publish them on the Internet before they’re able to do long division.

I think we will never have a brand new idea when we’re talking about cameras. Every camera, no matter how evolved, new, or even “revolutionary” will all come from the idea that the very first design had in mind: a captured moment. However we capture it, it is still a device used to capture what we see with our eyes, and not what we can paint with our hands. I’m sure there will be dramatic improvements over the next years, and there will be no doubt be another revolution that will do to digital what digital has done to film. But in the end of it all, we’re still reaching for the same goal, and in so doing, staying attached to that very first reproduced still image.

Ben

You’re right about one thing though - if they manage to make more sensitive light sensors, so you can shoot at the equivalence of 3200-6400 ISO, but with the smoothness of 200-400 ISO, then we might be onto a revolutionary shift.

- Haje

With canon 1D mark III you can take good quality photos at ISO 3200 which really is not even remotely possible with film. With F /1.2 lens or something like that you can even freeze moving cars in the night or take reasonable quality handheld photos in bad lightning conditions.

If that developes any further (which I am quite sure) it will really make some diffirence to photography.

About the question. It is possible to see something new. Still it is impossible to predict something like that just because it is something totallt NEW.

This simply means that the raw materials that photographers have to work with in the “darkroom” is now multiplied several-fold. Much of what this will allow with data from the actual scene is effects and final results that are currently achieved using Photoshop. Additional advances in lightfield research will allow snapshots to be manipulatedin new ways, and once HDR is integrated into the camera, the camera becomes the ultimate collection tool, and the real art begins in the “darkroom” (which is usually lit by the light of a computer screen).

Consider also the coming convergence with GPS. Add a GPS sensor to a digital camera, along with a radio (atomic) clock-setting feature, and you’ve got a device that records in the EXIF data the ‘real’ time and place a photograph was taken (barring post-photography fudging or obscuring of data intentionally). Now the camera becomes a social tool, a historical tool for future generations. Even a tool for law enforcement, social justice, historical accuracy. Every citizen a reporter, every citizen a witness to history. Not when photos sit in scrapbooks and are someday tossed out or burned in a house fire or floated down the river in a flood. But when they are posted on sites like Flickr, where they can be examined as data bits, points on a line, giving them new meaning beyond their primary purpose (being photographs).

Even now - look at Flickr. You can search for tags, including geo tags. You can export that as an RSS feed and then track it. Given an example, say ‘Barack Obama’, you can then track the candidate across the USA as he campaigns. For what purpose? I dunno - but technology like this will not go unexploited; people will figure out great (and potentially evil) uses for it.

Photography, in my opinion, is about to undergo a radical and fundamental change, and one which will affect huge segments of the world’s population, not just photography fans, artists, and those who appreciate photographic art.

The next 20 years in photography are going to be amazing. I’m glad I’m here for it.

At some point there will also be professional cameras with fewer buttons, maybe just the one shutter button.

I don’t even see how photography could be revolutionized - after all it is the capture of a visual moment.

I’ve heard yammerings that people will just take videos and use a still shot if they want one; I can’t see how that would possibly produce the artistic results we generally get now. We’d have to come up with some magical way of taking videos at F/16 or F/1.4 at 60fps, constantly, all the time…

Or holography. That could be the future, assuming we somehow make it happen quickly, but it certainly isn’t *new*, and the nature of a third dimension probably adds huge complexity.

HDR I can see. HDR tries to capture digitally what we see with our own eyeballs. I don’t like most ‘tonemapped’ pictures, with their bright foregrounds and dark skies and halos, but I bet that’s because our brain does HDR in real time, whereas an HDR image is a *static* image.

However, really well done HDR can give you something that you can’t get with a camera and isn’t too distracting (not having to use a fill flash, etc.)

Admittedly I don’t know the physics involved, but it was always interesting to me that a CCD needed roughly the same exposure time as film - is there any reason that shouldn’t change? Could incredibly sensitive digital sensors make low-light photography really easy?