I've convinced myself that waiting till this fall to make my dSLR purchase makes the most sense, with updated models from Pentax and very certainly a Canon 40D as another option. (I have a friend with a 10D and several "L" lenses which he very generously lets me borrow quite often.) But of course, the waiting is so hard.
So, in lieu of any actual news, I figured, hey, how about some pointless armchair prognosticating?
First, here's what I'd
like to see within the realm of realistic. (There's some "dream" wishlist items like switching to the Fuji sensor or the Java API I was talking about in the other thread, but I want to constrain this to what's actually reasonable to hope for.)
For the "K111D":
- Switch to a custom lithium battery to make even smaller. That should be the focus here.
- Maybe ditch the on-camera flash? Or make smaller and lamer so it's there as a feature-checklist item.
- Drop the price to $300 body-only.
- Slightly in the realm of fantasy: kit lens is new cheap 30mm prime. (Fits with point #1.)
- Work on getting the auto white balance spot-on for incandescent and other indoor lighting.
For the "K101D":
- Again, switch to custom lithium batteries. Better performance, less need to worry about out-of-spec power, and smaller. Sure there's downsides, but overall, there's a reason everyone else does this.
- Add a second control wheel -- another easy way to be uniquely powerful at this price niche.
- Make work with the new ultrasonic ring motors.
- Again with the auto-WB.
For the "K11D", really, if the K101D would actually match the above, I'd probably get that. Failing that, I'd like to see improvements in the jpeg processing engine (including, yes, the white balance). I like to take pictures rather than fuss around with RAW, and except for exceptional cases, in-camera processing
ought to be as good as off-camera. And of course improvements in high ISO image quality are always welcome.
So, while I think the above things are
possible, my expectations are a bit lower. I think in reality, we'll see:
K110D completely dropped. There's just not enough to differentiate this from the K100D, and although the ultra-small idea above would make me happy, make a great second body, and blow the Nikon D40 out of the water, I have doubts it'd really happen.
K100D "upgraded" to more megapixels, because doing that seems to be mandatory. Not sure what else is realistic to expect. Better dust removal? Thoughts?
K10D: I'm actually optimistic about the image processing improvements. I expect more megapixels, for better or worse. Anything else?