> Ever heard of a thing called competition? Sure. Ever heard of a thing called market economics?
> Pentax will probably HAVE TO follow the > nikon/canon model of aps then full size > digital sensors in SLRs to stay competitive. Pentax are already far from competitive in the only area where a full-frame sensor makes sense; the advanced amateur and low-end-pro market sector where somebody wants to be able to use the same lenses on both film and digital bodies. > SLRs will become the pro/advanced amateur > market only. They will abandon this market > or produce full frame SLR, they really have no choice... Sure they do. Digital is driven solely by pixel count. Today's 6MP sensor will be a 12MP at the next revision, and so forth. Sure, it will always be one step away from the bleeding edge. But Pentax have already accepted that they can't sell cameras at the price that would be needed to play in that space - hardly anybody would buy a $7,000 Pentax, That's Canon's bailiwick, with some small amount of competition coming from Nikon. If you're going to be one generation back from the cutting edge you may as well do it with smaller, lighter, cheaper systems. SLRs will continue to be a niche market, just as they are today. They sell to the few people who want the flexibility of interchangeable lenses. But this has nothing to do with sensor size. That's why Canon have announced their equivalnt to the DA lenses. But Canon *are* large enough to have two independent lines of lenses. > Eventually, the only way to effectively > increase pixel count will be to make > sensor larger. Otherwise the pixels > get too small and become insensitive/noisy... The last several decades of technology improvement say that you're wrong. We're not at the level of counting individual photons yet, so sensors can get smaller without quality loss. Today the sweet spot gives us 6MP on the smaller sensor. Sensors can be made larger if you are prepared to pay the vastly increased cost. Individual pixels can be smaller, too; some of the current crop of 5MP cameras have sensors that are considerably smaller (but are probably only 8-bit sensors rather than the deeper one used in the *ist-D). How many pixels do you need, anyway? A 25-megapixel sensor the same size as the current one is a couple of generations away - we'll probably see that at affordable prices inside five years. THe one indisputable argument in favour of larger sensors is that they are less demanding on the lens for resolution. But it's easier to make high-resolution lenses with smaller image circles, so even this advantage is somewhat mitigated.
