There are lots of new cameras hitting the market all the time, and if anything the pace of development seems to be accelerating. But it’s all clustered around a couple of key areas, notably video, burst capture and AI subject-recognition autofocus.
Now video is a key topic, of course, as we move inexorably from old-school stills photography into hybrid content creation and the ever more important creator economy, but even here camera development seems evolutionary rather than revolutionary, with camera makers constantly leapfrogging each other with slightly better codecs, slightly faster frame rates, slighly better oversampling, color sampling, compression options and bitrates and so on. The big breakthrough was 4K for all, and 6K and 8K video still seem like niche areas waiting for the rest of the technological ecosphere to catch up.
And while AI subject recognition and tracking is sometimes uncannily effective, it’s also quite niche. It’s a sub-set of subjects shot in a certain way. It’s not all of photography. Regular wide-area, zone or spot AF still works fine for most of us, and we had effective subject tracking long before AI. Sports and action photography are pretty niche too, at least those that demand the kind of 20-40fps burst rates and faster that are now being pushed as selling points.
The thing is, in the areas which used to be the main pre-occupation of stills photographers – notably sensor size and resolution – nothing much seems to be happening.
The end of the resolution revolution?
Sony introduced the highest-resolution full frame sensor yet available in the Sony A7R IV way back in 2019 and there has been nothing bigger since. Indeed, makers seem to be moving away from ultra-high resolutions, maybe as more and more content is now consumed on digital displays not on giant billboards or in art galleries. Nikon introduced a 45.7MP sensor in the D850 back in 2017 and hasn’t really moved on from that since, while Panasonic seems to have quietly lost interest in its 45MP Lumix S1R, launched in 2019. Canon has its 45MP EOS R5, of course, but while it’s updated the lesser EOS R6 II, there’s no sign yet of an EOS R5 II.
Tastes and needs change, of course, and you could argue that these big 40MP+ sensors just had (or have) more resolution than real-world use requires). Be that as it may, if your primary interest is still image quality, I do think you can genuinely argue that the best cameras have already been made. And what I mean by that is that these high-resolution cameras of the past few years could represent a kind of high-water-mark in still imaging.
Camera makers may have decided that enough is enough, this all went far enough and there’s no reason to take resolution any further. That’s all right – as long as they don’t decide that it went too far, it interferes too much with video capture and burst performance and that high-resolution sensors are no longer practical. One day we might live in a world where 24MP is as high as it gets.
So if you are a quality-fixated stills photographer, don’t assume there’s more to come. We should celebrate the cameras we have, while they’re still here.