Originally posted by Unsinkable II 50MP with noiseless ISO50,000 and post-shot selective DOF by 2020. In a compact.
It's interesting to hypothesise about the immediate future, but 2020 isn't far off...
Whenever I read comments like this, I
have to respond ...
A digital revolution is nice. But it won't beat the laws of physics. At least, there are no signs whatsoever this will happen any time soon
Read about quantum efficiency and photon shot noise. And you'll see that current dSLRs are deceivingly close to the physically possible. Another stop in quantum efficiency, another stop now lost in color filters and maybe another stop in black noise. And that it is. Only exception is dynamic range which can be made arbitrarily large by adding a digital frame buffer into the sensor. Needing more? Use bigger lenses. Better images need more photons. As simple as this. Really. Look at owls
Of course, you can play with stacking images in camera, aligning and removing movable parts etc. All possible in the digital domain. Already possible now in post processing and I use it. I know the limitations. It helps in some cases (mostly where a tripod would do too) but won't help in others (like in action photography). So, in general, by 2020, things won't be much different from now.
And "post-shot selective DOF" (read Lytro) is another take at raping off venture capital firms. Lytro's Ng can't beat Heisenberg's uncertainty relation (not even a Stanford degree can help here
). So, read optics textbooks and understand why a plenoptics light field camera only produces low resolution (sub MP) images. German Raytrix does a bit better (actually now owning all the patents) but use a kind of prefocus, a suitable compromise between fully refocussable and fuly prefocussed. This achieves resolution suitable for movies but not still images.