Cassandra Call. 11 years ago, our camera club had a small discussion on photography and a certain prognosticator said that cameras and photofinishing were going digital – and very very soon. So hold off on getting a big wet development lab or moving up to that Hasselblad or Contax.
Scoffed at.
Well lets try again. In 3-4 years time digital SLR and Video cameras will have substantially merged. Impetus: its already happening on both sides. Nikon has just announced its DX2 SLR with huge bracketing capabilities at 5 and 8 frames per second. Ditto for Canon Ultra vidocamera able to squeeze off 2MPixel still images. But the biggest impetus is hardware and HDTV. HDTV will force video camera up to the 2-4Mpixel range which is perfect for huge snapshot market. On the hardware side, multi-port buses, colossal storage drives, and multi-threading Picture processors will be the key enablers of a merger. Look for Canon to lead the way because they already straddle (and dominate) the high range SLR and video camera markets.