I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that the compact digital camera as we know it is going to go the way of the dodo bird. I'm actually referring more the the tiny compact cameras, and not the more sophisticated SLR cameras often seen in the hands of professional photographers. At least until just a while ago, they were only seen in the hands of pros. Now a days, your more likely to see your friend, neighbor colleague, or family member with a fancy SLR equipped with some big hocking lens strapped to the end of it. Well, there's some good reasons for that.

One is price. SLRs, and other digital cameras have been dropping rapidly in price over the last few years. Partially because digital technology as evolved at such a rapid rate. But also partially because consumer demand has allowed manufacturers to hit unforeseen levels of mass production, and the savings that accompany those economies of scale.

Another important breakthrough in the realm of SLRs, is the increased usability. Basically, SLR cameras have gotten very simple to use. If you can use a compact camera, then there's no reason to believe you can't use a SLR camera. This is primarily due to the incorporation of automatic settings. Automatic settings allow you to either choose a menu option, or turn a wheel to pick something like "landscape", and the camera knows exactly how to set shutter speed, ISO, white balance and a boatload of other settings.

Once you get more comfortable with the camera, you will have the option to control in intimate detail all of those individual settings. This brings up another important breakthrough with SLR cameras, and that is creative control. While this has been available in SLR cameras for years, only recently was the learning curve to those features made so easy.

Some present and future breakthroughs I see for digital SLR cameras include full length high definition movies, wireless photo / video sharing capabilities, and GPS location stamping abilities. With all this cool stuff, why would anyone settle for anything less than a SLR camera.