August 23, 2007, 10:51 amWaiting for Products to Arrive
The other day, I was looking at some absolutely amazing pictures of my kids, on a beach, at sunset, that my wife took with our trusty Canon SD800 digital camera. It was just amazing to see the quality that could come from a little tiny shirt-pocket cam like that. I smiled. “Yep,” I thought, “the pocket digital camera has finally arrived.”
And I’m not alone. I often hear people tell me how much they love their cameras. The shirt-pocket camera is “there yet.”
There’s a lot of stuff, though, that’s not there yet. I’ve been writing my Times column for seven years, and I’m still waiting for certain products and product categories to get “there.” Yeah, sure, we live in a wondrous age of innovation and technology—but there’s still a lot that won’t arrive for a few more years.
Here are a few things I’m waiting for.
The pocket SLR. As much as I love that little Canon, its photos only sometimes attain the spectacular visual quality of an S.L.R. (one of those big black semi-pro cameras that cost over $500 and can’t record movies). Apparently it’s really, really difficult to get that kind of quality in a small camera, thanks to the obnoxious intrusion of something called physics.
Still, the barriers between the two are slowly falling. This week, Canon and Nikon both unveiled new S.L.R.s that behave like pocket cams in at least one regard: they let you frame your shot using the back-panel screen, if you like, instead of having to use the eyepiece for all shots. (Olympus’s S.L.R.’s pioneered this feature.)
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