Industry Push and Pull

September, 2005
In the midst of while I was shooting with a pre-production Canon 5D in Greece, in early September, 2005, I saw that Sony had announced theDSC-R1, a 10.3 Megapixel digicam with an attached Carl Zeiss 24 - 120 mm equivalent f/2.8 - f/4.8 zoom, to be priced at around US $1,000.
What makes the new Sony so interesting is that it's the first digicam with an APS-C sized sensor, the size used in so-called reduced frame DSLR – essentially all of the current cameras from Canon, Nikon, Konica/Minolta, Pentax etc., with the exception of the Canon 1Ds series and the new 5D.

This may well represent a sea-change in the industry, because as reported by Phil Askey via Sony, with its dramatically larger sensor the DCS-R1 will have "...five times the sensitivity compared to the DSC-F828 and 2.5 times the dynamic range compared to the DSC-F828". In other words, this new digicam may well provide image quality comparable to that from current DSLRs, and with pixel density ex...