All the reading on Thom's page was quite good. I liked the state of DX/FX too. Thanks. BTW, you guys are great. Somehow, quite accidentally, I've found a band of civilized, curious, and informative photonerds, without having to wade through the typical camera-gear flamage.
Yesterday I got out in bright mid-afternoon light with about an hour to kill and a few buildings and walks I wanted to study. It occurs to me that I've been too focused on speed, mostly because I aspire to shoot people/events (as a commercial sideline)
RAW files from the D300 and Sigma at f/4-8 are really quite good. They need a little more dynamic range, but there's detail and solid flare suppression, and nicely saturated color.
A few times yesterday, some very polite people actually stopped to avoid walking through my shot. I was pretty focused on the building, but they noticed me and my gigantic camera (D300 plus 18-50 f/2.8)
It would have been nice to have a stabilized f/4 zoom or a couple of small f/2 or even f/2.8 primes, provided that they were sharp from the widest aperture. If I were commissioning lens designs for my use, I'd want to see a completed, stabilized, f/4 zoom lens progression alongside the f/2.8s, though I'd probably only be interested in the wide one. In a sense Nikon's there with the 16-35, 24-120, and 70-300, though the last is variable.
For primes, I'd say design them from about f/2 so that they have razor sharp centres, but vignette a bit and sharpness falls unless backed out one stop. Sort of a hybrid f/2-f/2.8. They almost have this with the current 35mm f/2, though from tests it looks more like an f/2.8-5.6 before the centre and sides respectively get right.
Thom's bit about mirrorles is really intriguing - especially about just morphing it into the crop DSLR bodies. Canon's probably best positioned to do this. They could just make it so a line of mirrorless EF-x lenses protrudes into the lens throat. The large diameter gives them lots of room for pancake looking wide primes once you get the whole mirror assembly out of the way.
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