I think you hit the nail on the head, Scott. With a mass manufactured
product, no one model will usually suit everyone's tastes. There will
be people who nitpick about this feature vs that feature and wish that
it had x, y and z.

As technology improves, people's expectations grow higher as well. A
couple of years back, when 2-3 megapixels was the standard for CCDs,
people were wishing for 4, 5, 6 or even 8. Now consumer models are
hitting the 8 megapixel zone, people want 12 and beyond.

I think film cameras were also limited very much by physical factors -
mainly the film and the process of exposing frames. Because
manufacturers did not have control over the film, there weren't many
factors to play with - apart from shutter and aperture. Maybe they
could improve the AF and exposure control electronics, but that was
largely "intangible" to users.

With digital and the use of CCD / CMOS sensors, and digital processors
we're in a whole new ball game. There are so many more variables now
and much of the factors can be tweaked - i.e. how large CCDs are, how
many photosites/pixels go into the CCD, and everything else that goes
in to the processory and firmware such as speed of operation, buffer
memory, image processing algorithms etc.

Digital is progressing, but I think there is plenty of scope for
improvement.


Cheers,
Julian
http://www.shuttertalk.com - the friendliest digital photography forums
on the net!