As Canon did announce two new dSLRs officially it's time to write some thoughts about the perfect digital camera for me.

Type

It should be a SLR definitely. I just like to have the oportunity to change the lens. And to change the body as well without buying new lenses necessarily.

Further it's nice to see exactly what you'll shoot. Now I already hear: “but you do see this on the monitor of any digital camera anyway”. Yes—but I like to have the camera at my eyes and not to hold it at armlong away. If I see all the people doing this, I don't wonder why so many pictures are not sharp. If you have much motion blur you don't need to focus very well anyway…

Concept

I like working with my Canon EOS 300. So it would be plus to have a similar concept (I don't like the way of the Minolta SLRs e.g.). But I think most actual dSLRs have good concepts which I could get used to.

The Sensor

A resolution of 8 MP would be nice, but is more really needed? Here more than resolution is important as the tests of magazines show. The amount of information of a 6 MP camera is not much lower compared to a 8 MP camera necessarily.

But what size for the sensor? Formerly I tended to say I want a full frame (35 mm) sensor, but I'm not sure any longer. All tests show that current full frame sensors can't cope with “normal” lenses very well. And the lenses they work well with are often too expensive… So now I tend more towards APS-C size sensors. The crop factor doesn't get too high and many consumer lenses are acceptable to use with theses sensors. Additionally there're already many new lenses designed specially for this sensor size on the market. You even get good wide-angle lenses for crop factors of 1.6. The lenses can be smaller and lighter as well, which is nice for carrying all the equipment.

What I'd be more interested in would be more cameras using the Foveon X3 chip. Sigma is supposed to announce a SD11 soon, but I don't like Sigma's concept of their (d)SLRs too much (and you don't get as many lenses as for Canon, Nikon, or Konica Minolta). And it would be very interesting to get chips that react more like film to the incidence of light.

Actually there're two other important or interesting points about the sensor. First to have an integrated cleaning device (like in Olympus' E-1). Second the anti-shake system of Konica Minolta is very nice.

Choices

Neither the Canon 5D, nor the 1D Mark IIN are serious candidates for me (much too expensive). The Canon 20D comes close, but I'm still waiting for the successor. With the 5D I expect this to happen next spring at the earliest.

The Konica Minolta 7D could be a good candidate as well, if it would have 8 MPs. And Olympus' FourThirds systems looks interesting as well, but there I miss the big variety of lenses I could choose from.

The tests in the German fotoMagazin show, that the Canon 20D would be a good choice indeed, and outperforms all alternatives I have, but still I'll wait a bit yet…