- Manual focus!

- DOF scales on lenses

- WEATHER SEALING!

- I will gladly trade the 18MP CCD for a 12-14 CMOS sensor (full frame). You can even make it a Fuji SuperCCD sensor, because dynamic range is more important than megapixles (12MP is enough)

- Leica M-mount

- If you put a more sophisticated matrix meter in there I will be eternally thankful. Digital just does not have the very forgiving exposure latitude of negative film and therefore needs a pretty accurate meter. Just pull the meter out of the D700 and we’ll call it even.

- I DO NOT WANT AN EVF for the viewfinder. I need a display that runs in 100% REALTIME.
Just copy what Leica did with the M-series.

- RAW buffer for at least 12 images.

I will purchase two of these cameras if you build them. Maybe three.

Funny you mention the G11, because when it was first announced I was quite excited, but when I saw how bulky it was thanks to the introduction of the swivel screen, it just turned me off. Put the G11 in a G9 body and I would probably be happy.

Regards noise reduction, the ACR is very capable (I am assuming that it is either the same or better than in 4.6 as I am using CS3), but my method will give you rather more control over the final result, and has the added advantage of working with scans of high speed films, or under exposed negatives.

To summarise though, You CAN’T have what you want, what you really really want………yet!

That is, until market forces (primarily) and technological progression stimulate manufacturers to produce a comercially viable camera that you (and the rest of us luddites) want.

Until then you can buy a Canon G11 – or have my old F30!!!

Paul

PS: I’ll try your photoshop trick but how does that compare to the chroma noise reduction built into the Adobe Camera Raw 5.6 plug-in? I use this with noise ninja which gives excellent results (particularly with my LX3 shots at higher ISOs)

Image noise has two variants, chrominance and luminance. Luminance noise has a characteristic that is not unlike film grain, and is generally acceptable. Chrominance noise is the horrid coloured blotchiness that we all hate. Both these forms of noise are caused when the signal is amplified, and are exacerbated by reducing the pixel pitch or size.

I maintain that the GF1 and the EP series cameras demonstrate that a reasonable size sensor is perfectly feasible, and in fact a larger sensor could be used if the lens accompanying it has a larger imaging circle than is required for that size of sensor (to mitigate the vignette issue). And 6MP is perfectly adequate: there are many experts who have gone on the record saying that, and my own experience printing massive prints from what is effectively 4MP back that up.

As an aside, I have a neat solution to chrominance noise when processing an image: copy the image onto a new layer in photoshop; run that layer through a gaussian blur filter (the exact level will vary from one image to another); use the colour blend mode watching the effect in bright red contrast areas to maintain image integrity. The effect is change the appearance of the chrominance noise to something similar to luminance noise.

Finally, Martin Parr’s British, and he does that sort of thing, and there are plenty of others too. Look up In-Public.

Remember you wanted:
1) HIGH QUALITY lens
2) F2
3) usable to ISO 1000

That’s not going to happen with a sensor smaller than APS-C unless you don’t mind the in-camera noise reduction turning the image into something akin to smearing vaseline on your lens or unless you significantly reduce pixel density by dropping down the pixel count – and lets face it, although the manufacturers are slowly realising the pixel race game doesn’t fool serious photographers, they’re unlikely to drop pixel counts back to my wonderful Fuji F30′s 6MP.

Re: streetphotography & use of viewfinder – all the masters you quoted are Yanks (obviously except for Bresson) – they clearly don’t mind just walking up to people and clicking in their faces. We’re British, we don’t do that sort of thing!

To start with I just said it needs to be a reasonable size sensor (never mentioned APS-C or any other size), by which I mean not the kind of thing seen in either phones or bottom rung compacts. Olympus and Panasonic have proven that you can have a reasonable sensor in a small body and still have room to incorporate the flanges of an interchangeable lens. Furthermore, every film compact I ever owned (including the rather wonderful Yashica T3) used 35mm film… full frame. So you are right regards not being able to change the laws of physics, but none of the laws were being broken when Olympus introduced the XA in 1979, and they don’t need to be broken now.

I know what you mean about viewfinders and street photography, and some of my own favourite images where taken without reference to a viewfinder. But watch some videos of Garry Winogrand, or Bruce Gilden, or Lee Friedlander or the great Henri Cartier-Bresson at work, and you will see that they managed to use the viewfinder for an enormous number of their iconic images, even in really intrusive situations that most mortals would shy well away from.

To quote Scotty, ‘ye canna change the laws of physics’
(far more highbrow than George Bernard Shaw)

I deliberated long and hard about which compact to buy and in the end plumped for the LX3. It’s by no means perfect, and IQ is significantly inferior to even my prosumer level DSLR but if you’re using it for street photography (when using the viewfinder isnt usually appropriate anyway) and as long as you don’t want to blow the images up >A4, it’ll do.

P

To be fair to Ricoh, the viewfinder problem that I keep harping on about would be impossible to achieve on the GXR platform, since you could not include the viewfinder in the lens module, and similarly you could not put it on the body, since it would need to change with each lens module.

In essence, interesting though the GXR is, I think it overcomplicates the solution to a basic problem: how to create a high quality compact. To answer that, the manufacturers need to ask what a compact is supposed to do, and it seems to me that increasingly they are trying to create machines that are all things to all people. But they can’t, and that is not what a compact is supposed to be. I mean, if we are going to create features that are useful, how about a shift and tilt lens? What about ring flash? What about an infra red sensor setting? All of these things are technically possible (yes, there is an infra red digital camera based on the Nikon D100 if you are interested.)

A compact camera should be small and light enough to want to carry it all the time; easy enough to use that it becomes instinctive; discreet enough to use that people pay you no heed when you point it in their direction; of high enough image quality that a great shot can be submitted to libraries; strong enough that given it is to be carried all day every day it doesn’t fail within a year; cheap enough that if it does fail you don’t feel robbed.

Nothing currently available meets these criteria, but I am certain that if something was made that did, it would be a best seller.

I have to admit to being surprised by the responses to my suggestion so far. I posted this on LightStalkers as well, and the most telling response was, “Fairy tales are no longer commercially viable”.