The Digital Shopping Dilemma

People say that digital is fundamentally different from film because it's changing so much more quickly. But it's not like film camera technology has been standing still. Just to name a few of the most obvious developments in the past two decades: autofocus; multi-segment evaluative metering; built-in motor drives and winders; lighter weight and lower adjusted cost due to polycarbonates and improved materials science; press-molded aspheric elements in lenses, resulting in far less spherical aberration at wide apertures; extra-low dispersion, anomalous partial dispersion, and fluorite elements in telephotos, greatly reducing chromatic aberration; and TTL flash metering and CPU-controlled fill-flash. And those are just the bigger developments. The changes are not as dramatic as we've witnessed in the ongoing development of consumer digicam CCD and CMOS sensors, but if you compare a mid-'70s Canon AE-1 with, say, an EOS-3, it becomes a bit difficult to su...