PCPhoto Magazine has posted an interview with Chuck Westfall, Canon’s Director of Media & Customer Relationship, Camera Marketing Group, about the future in DSLR photography. Here’re some of the interesting discussions from the article :

PCPhoto: What do you perceive as the important qualities and features that photographers are primarily concerned with? Is higher and higher resolution still key?

Westfall: What we’ve determined over the last year or two is that people have moved beyond megapixels and into the other aspects of image quality. They’re especially starting to notice the level of noise that happens at the higher ISOs, because that’s such an important part of how an SLR photographer likes to shoot. They want to be able to shoot under low-light conditions and they want the flexibility to decide whether or not to use flash, rather than be forced to.

PCPhoto: Is the decreasing impact of noise happening as a result of the sensors, software, or both?

Westfall: The sensors themselves are certainly making progress in terms of combating noise. That’s why the CMOS sensors are so highly regarded because they exceed what can be done with the CCD in terms of conventional digital SLRs. Overall, they offer better noise performance at high ISO speeds, larger sensors for the money and lower power consumption. We’re increasingly seeing improvement in the manufacturing of sensors. Right now, we’re looking at a native ISO sensitivity of 100 to 200, but that could move up to 6400 and higher very quickly. When that happens, it will make a big difference in a photographer’s ability to create images under low light.

PCPhoto: Canon has been one of the few companies to release a fullframe SLR. While this has allowed photographers to take advantage of their lenses’ native focal length, it has also revealed that some lenses don’t deliver even illumination throughout the frame or corner-to-corner sharpness.

Westfall: We’re working to optimize quality with full-frame sensors. In the past with film SLRs, things weren’t as critical, but as we’re clearly seeing with cameras such as the EOS 5D and 1DS Mark II, they’re putting some high demands on the performance of any given lens. So we’re certainly looking at ways of improving evenness of illumination and corner sharpness.

PCPhoto: This wireless technology affords the ability to quickly download not only to one’s computer, but to virtually any server connected to the Web. This potentially holds the promise of freeing photographers of the limitations of the size or speed of their memory cards. How do you see this impacting photographers?

Westfall: This will definitely offer increased storage for users. If it becomes easier to save images to Web servers directly from digital cameras via wireless communication, I believe that this technology will add an element of reliability that’s missing from today’s cameras. Also, more sophisticated metadata stored with each image could potentially make it easier to archive images and search for individual files. Why should photographers be limited to the capacity of a memory card in their cameras, when they have the ability to be virtually anywhere and upload images on the fly?

Website : Canon’s Chuck Westfall Q&A about the future DSLR development

Website : PCPhoto Magazine June 2006 articles