> > From: "Herb Chong" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > > weather resistant body at least and at least a few lenses, 5fps or higher > > frame rate with at least 10 pictures on the fly, and more megapixels. 6 > > megapixels is fine for magazine work but more is always better, other things > > being equal. if Pentax is going to deliver a $5K body, it will have to > > deliver the goods. if they aren't, then i will find a $5K body that will. > > Yes indeed. I wouldn't have expected Pentax to deliver a $5K body, so if > that is in fact rumored I'm surprised. It might still not have a 5fps > "motor drive" given Pentax's apparent lack of interest in such things--it > might instead be a competitor to the 1DS and Kodak 14N in having a slow > frame rate and much higher resolution. This would seem more in keeping > with Pentax design philosophy. > > DJE
Who knows what Pentax's "design philosophy" is? Do even they know? They have, over the years, made occasional forays into high-frame-rate cameras. The LX, MX, and Super Program all offered ~5fps motor drives as well as the 1.5fps - 2fps winders. The PZ-1p offered a 4.3fps film advance rate. In each case you'd have had to spend a great deal more to get a comparable camera with better frame rates. But frame rates (and burst length) depend on third-party technology. I'd expect buffer sizes to go up faster than image size, so the next DSLR will probably have a burst length greater than the five or six frames of the *ist-D - maybe not the 40 frames of the current high- end models, but at least 16-20 frames. Frame rate depends on how fast you can clock the data out of the sensor and reset the chip. Assuming a 10 megapixel camera with a sixteen-bit pixel depth that's 20 megabytes of data for each image. At 5 frames per second that's a 100 megabyte per second data rate. That's slow by memory transfer speeds, but quite fast for polled I/O. We'll just have to see what future sensor chips offer for readout.
