Perhaps it's the fate of all technologies to be climacteric fruit: to develop for a while, reach a zenith of ripeness, and then start to fade as mass-market constraints leave it uneconomic to make the decent ones any more, as everyone instead buys the flashy ones based on features they don't, in fact, actually need. We've seen it happen to keyboards, mobile phones, arguably land-line phones, and perhaps now to compact cameras too.

Or perhaps I'm just a curmudgeonly old cynic, and should go and take my place among the vinyl-record and vacuum-tube adherents...

Peter