Read today a lot of camera reviews. Here’s my take on what’s interesting in the smallish-format world:

• The Leica MP. This is just a beautiful, elegant manual SLR. $4000 gets you in, with a 35mm f/2 lens. This is the camera you give to grandchildren. I want to buy this camera and sell everything else. It’s so romantic. Fuck digital.
  
• The Sony F828. 8 megapixels. Zeiss lens. Very responsive. $1000. What more do you want?
  
• The whole Canon EOS digital lineup. Full support for EOS lenses (I already own an EOS camera so this is great). Firewire. And all the nice features you’d expect on an SLR camera. The cheap one is $900 and does 6 megapixels. The expensive one is $8000 and does 11 megapixels. That’s without a lens. But still. I’m excited about where this is going.
  
• For output: The Epson 2200. 13” x 44” prints. Archival inks. And as I hear, everything that comes out of this printer looks fantastic. $700 bucks to get in, plus a buck or so per print for ink and paper.
  

The Leica is the only thing that won’t be half the price within 18 months. But it’s impractical. But even if it’s a good investment, the opportunity cost is high. A year’s worth of 35mm film and processing will buy you a good digital camera.

The cheaper Canon digital SLRs are the most practical thing right now. EOS lenses are great, and they won’t lose value over time (I sold an EOS 50mm f/1.4 lens on eBay for more than the new price I’d paid 4 years prior). You can get an EOS lens for any occasion. Dish out the money for the body, knowing you’ll lose half of it, then just start investing in lenses. When enough CCD improvements have been made, ditch the body and get a new one.

I’m most excited by the prices of the digicams. CCD prices are always dropping. CCDs are getting more dense and larger. There are still problems common to all digital cameras (the kind of noise created by CCDs, the overexposed bits of a picture that bleed out, etc.)… but I’d be pretty happy not to worry about storing thousands of slides and negatives in folders.

But where’s the digital equivalent of the super Yashica T4 Super point-and-shoot 35mm camera? No clear winner yet, I think.