Having been on the market for a digital camera the last few weeks I have seen that for the most part, and particularly to the non-photographer, is that the selection of models available differ minimally from one another.  This got me thinking: what new features would I like to see incorporated into the next geneartion of mass market digital cameras.

Security

I envision a solution that adds an authentication challenge to perform destructive operations such as deleting a picture or video.  This solution would require a tradeoff in that certain operations would be inaccessible unless the camera was docked at which point a challenge would be issued before the enablement of these operations.  The solution would need to be built into the camera and not require software installation on a single computer.  This technique would allow the typical mobility expected out of a digital camera and the flexibilty for the user to use whatever computer or operating system they want to manage their camera.

WiFi

I would like my camera to have the ability to bond to a WiFi network.  Perhaps extending the functionality described above around security the camera could be configured to connect to a particular wireless network with the typical connection options such as WEP or WPA2.  Once connected a share extended from a home computer could be mapped to the camera and on a schedule, perhaps every night, or once a week, the camera would connect and download all content to the share.  Even without the scheduling and automation the ability to point the camera at a network share and download content would be benificial.

High Speed Internal Memory

I reuse many of my sdram cards and rarely purchase the hi-speed ones required for some advanced, hi-speed camera operations.  I would like to see the camera include a small amount of interanal hi-speed memory that was used as a write buffer during camera operations.  Once the operation was complete or a particular amount of the buffer was filled the data would be transfered to the secondary storage.

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