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Comment not even close (Score 1) 596

As usual, the commentators know more than the article-writer. With Pentax coming out with it's digital medium-format 645D, talking about an end to the megapixel wars is just plain silly. If you are only going to shoot pictures for yourself and your family, you don't need more than six megapixels and a long, long zoom. Lots of competition in that market. But if you are going to do any professional work you have to have a dSLR, and APS-C is limited. FF is the edge of the mainstream market, and even that will be less in quality than the medium format and full-format backs that cost what many people would like to earn in a year. Of course, megapixels aren't the be all and end-all of cameras. Bit-depth for real high dynamic range, rather than tone-mapping tricks for surreal images is a big factor in the future. Replacing Bayer's filters by having Foveon-style sensors perfected and increasing in megapixels and size is another, for getting better color reproduction. Higher quality zooms to eliminate the need for lens-changing (which introduces dust to the body and the sensor surface) and yet avoid CA, barrel-distortion and pincushioning is another. As nearly everyone has mentioned, eliminating noise in high ISO settings, an area where even common technologies haven't been tapped yet. Film is still 'better', but far less practical. Camera manufacturers and photographers won't be content until the quality of film is exceeded in every respect. Canon and Nikon will continue to focus on advertising and the sports market. Pentax will continue to focus on the outdoors market with build quality, weather-proofing, low battery usage, and in the near future, weight and size reduction. Sony will continue to focus on more features for the price. Olympus still makes great cameras, but the 4:3 alliance needs to do some re-thinking when the rest of the community is salivating for FF.

Comment Re:Asteroid mining? (Score 1) 157

Nonsense, we've done it before, and at this size it would actually be more like the Gemini 6 and 7 mission. Are we sure this isn't an Apollo 2nd stage booster? We've been fooled by that once before. Too bad we aren't ready for this, it could be a nice place to put a radio telescope for -really- long baseline interferometry. What class asteroid is it? If nickel iron, eventually we could heat it up and blow it up into a small habitat. If icy or chondritic, it wouldn't take very much delta- (relatively speaking) to land it on the moon.

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