Impact of the new Kodak and Canon digital SLRs on the VR World

How will these exciting new cameras affect the world of VR? It is a great advance to capture the exact same frame behind any given SLR lens as film. Clearly CCDs still do not capture as much information as a good film (which is reputed to contain somewhere between 80 and 400MB of data), most people do not scan and use 80-400 MB worth of data from any given film shot. I have seen a few sample shots from these cameras, and they look to be at least as good as a D1x, so I believe these cameras will functionally replace film for many purposes such as web panoramas. Digital cameras appear to have entered the same obsolescence cycle as computers: if you wait 9-12 months, a new generation of machines will obsolete any given model.

Being able to turn around photographs into VRs within hours of shooting will probably become expected in the next year or two. We take for granted getting film snapshots processed in an hour--why not VRs as well?

Keep that wallet open: In order to store a reasonable number of 14 megapixel images on camera, you'll need one or more 1 GB or larger CF cards. And most likely, in order to stitch any number of 14 megapixel images together, a new-ish 1-3 Ghz computer with 2 or more GB of RAM would be required for reasonable processing time. It's possible some stitching software will not handle 14 megapixel images, so you might need to acquire new stitching software. And when you're done building that monster pano, be prepared to write it out to one CD or DVD. I would guess one panorama might take up even more disk space if you edit the raw image files in Photoshop. So the cost to work in this space just went up beyond the $4 or 9k price of the camera: prepare to factor in acquiring 1 GB CF cards, a new computer, and DVD writer.

Last update: 1/6/06; 2:41:53 PM.