> And is there any reason for a digital camera to look like the old 35mm > format camera? Like most innovations the new is given respectability by > making it look like an older popular type. For compatability with high quality 35mm lenses - partly. 1) The mount - it is an engineering necessity 2) Lens-film plane distance: the sensor needs to be as far back as the film was. 3) Mirror: frankly, my eye can still obtain better focus on a well engineered optical screen than it can looking at a low resolution LCD (esp in bright sunlight). Auto-focus might suit some but 90% of the time the place I want in focus is not the same as where the sensor is. The shape of the 35mm camera kind of evolved: sure there are areas where the DSLR equivalent could migrate - and indeed thay have - but in other ways you could ask "why change a mature design?". Why? Maybe because "quality" images are consigned to history? For snappy snap cameras, of course there are good reasons for changing. Most pictures taken these days only ever get looked at on the preview screen. Of those that make it to a download, most of them only ever get viewed in a window of a 1024 x 768 PC monitor (usually badly downscaled to fit by some really sh*tty MicroSoft algorithm. The fraction that end up as prints bigger than postcard size is almost extinct. Ergo, lens quality is all but irrelavent. The act of sharing pictures - rather than taking and archiving them <G> - is a far more accesible and immediate part of modern mass-market photography. In that sense, it's not photography for its own sake (pictorialism) but visual "networking". Communiaction for communication's sake? A credit card sized camera is fine: indeed, web cams have more than enough res for sharing pics by phone. Does it affect pros though? Strangely I think it will. The customer gets accustomed to the medium. If low-res but immediate images become "de rigeur" in the general culture, then such images won'tlook out of place. It's already happening. > These "phallic" cameras are > really to give a "flashy" appearance rather than for function. Yawn! Sorry Chris, this comment says more about you than the cameras :( > I suppose a lens does have to have some length and the eye has to see the > frame somehow, but do we have to hold it at eye height, a special spectacle > connected by a blue tooth link to the hand held camera might be easier and > having the IDC mounted on a "gun" handle would make it easier to aim and > shoot with a finger operated trigger. Failing the blue tooth radio link and > eye viewer then an adjustable screen mounted at the rear of the IDC would be > convenient too. That was suggested some years back: a "universal soldier" style eyepiece radio-linked to the camera would be a real boon esp for PJs. For street photography it would probalby have the opposite effect: drawing exesss attention to the wearer. Bob
