It seems to me that this is a terrible time to buy a new digital camera, certainly a terrible time to buy anything other than a sub-$200 point-and-shoot.
Mid-range compacts ($200-300) are going to be made obsolete pretty soon as the high-end compacts ($300-500) are heavily discounted and then their features are moved into the more inexpensive models. Why? Because DSLRs are starting to sell for under $500 and the Micro Four-Thirds system is going to make small sensor compacts look like the garbage they are.
High-end compacts, such as the Canon G10, are expensive but fundamentally inferior to low-end DSLRs in image quality. The only reason you would buy one of these cameras is because it’s smaller than a DSLR, but they’re still not exactly compact and their image quality is only a small notch above cheaper cameras. New Micro Four-Thirds cameras will be as small or smaller, offer interchangeable lenses, and (very near) DSLR-level image quality.
Meanwhile low-end DSLRs are getting cheaper as they face competition from Micro Four-Thirds compacts, each other, and heavily discounted mid-range DSLRs (e.g. the street price of the Nikon D80 body is around $600 now — that makes a Nikon D60 or Canon XSi at a similar price just look silly).
As we get to the mid-range and high-end DSLRs we have a bunch of cameras that are already obsolete, except (arguably) for the Sony A900 (with its new 25MP full frame sensor, but it’s a Sony…) and the much hyped Canon 5D mkII (with its outmoded AF). Nikon’s D300, D700, and D3 all are beginning to look a little behind the times (they were introduced with fairly low pixel counts, and the market has just accelerated away from them). Canon’s new low-end range has the main virtue of being (relatively) cheap. The D90’s innovative video mode is already looking like a beta-quality product (Costco is taking pre-orders for D90 kits and the D90 isn’t even out yet). I love Nikon, but the D90 is looking like a loser. It has a video mode that doesn’t quite work, 12-bit image processing, and a price point sandwiched between the Canon 40D and 50D, both of which beat it on build quality, responsiveness, and still image quality. The sad thing is that while the 40D and 50D make the D90 look silly, they’re also both obsolete. Canon has already announced that the 50D’s successor will probably feature video capture.
Some time in the next year we’re going to see:
- Micro Four-Thirds system cameras with in-body vibration reduction, HD-video capture, and a selection of superb lenses that don’t lock you to a single high-quality vendor (i.e. you’ll probably be able to buy Leica and Zuiko lenses for them at a minimum). At last we’ll be able to buy a pocketable camera that takes photos that are nearly as good as anything we could take with a “full-sized” camera.
- Reasonably-priced Canon or Nikon bodies with HD-video capture that doesn’t suck, 15+ MPs (with no appreciable image quality reduction), usable ISO 6400 (the D90 is damn close), 14-bit image processing, and — just possibly — in body vibration reduction. I wouldn’t be surprised if full frame sensor cameras appear in the $1500-2000 price range (heck, Sony will probably be there with the A900).
Obviously, if you’re a pro, your camera pays for itself, and next year’s camera doesn’t matter. But for most of us, we don’t get to drop $1000 on a camera every year, and this seems like a truly awful year to buy a camera.
On top of all this, the economic downturn is going to force camera companies to cut into their hefty margins on higher end gear to keep volumes up. Once consumers become used to $300 entry-level DSLRs, they’ll never be able to bring the price back up (nor should they).