My first camera was a Leica IIC, from 1949. Beautiful machine. German engineering, at its orderly best. Interchangeable screw-in lenses, rangefinder, no batteries - pure Teutonic machinery. Say what you like about Germans, but they know their sausages, beer, boiled wool, and engineering.

Digital cameras are poor substitutes for these old machines. They are disposable, too cheap to bother repairing, and the pictures do not have the color depth and range of a good film picture taken with (of course) good film.

Another thing - if you have a digital camera and you want higher resolution, you have to buy a new camera. If you have a film camera, you'd just have to buy different film - a lower ASA or ISO rating equals higher resolution. [True to a point - eventually, if you really want more pixels from your film camera, you have to move to bigger film, which does mean a new camera.] On the other hand, film is a pain in the ass and costs to process. And how many of us take good film pictures anyway? As I discovered from years of taking pictures with really good film cameras, a lousy picture on film is just as lousy as a lousy digital picture. Just more expensive.

But digital cameras do strive for their own form of perfection. You still need a lens, for which there is no cheap "digital" substitute. It has to be a fine piece of glass. And you need a good sensor. Most point-and-shoot camera sensors are the size of the nail on your little finger. Those 7 megapixels on my Canon SD800IS? Each one is an itty-bitty dot on that little chip. The photons that hit that little dot give you the signal that your camera turns into a point of colored light on the picture. A bigger sensor gives you a better picture because each pixel gets more photons. This means that the signal received by the sensor is a lot louder than the noise coming from the electronics inside of the camera. For a LOT more info on this and other stuff, check out the tutorials at cambridgeincolour.com; if you can tolerate graphs and charts, you can learn a lot.

An expensive DSLR, like the Canon EOS 40D, has a large sensor - 22.2mm x 14.8 mm. For you Murkans, that's about 0.87"x0.58" - about the size of the end of my thumb. But carrying around a DSLR means you have a bulky camera, at least one lens but preferably more, and a bag full of stuff. The camera makers have decided that if you want really fine pictures, you want a lot of gear. But there is one camera maker out there that offers a pocket camera with a large sensor - the Sigma DP1.

The DP1's sensor is not only large, it is a Foveon. Standard sensors have one layer for all three colors - red, green and blue - in a three-color variant of a checkerboard pattern. If a blue light ray falls on the red spot, it's lost. The Foveon sensor exploits different wavelengths' ability to travel different distances into silicon - red can go a little deeper than green, and blue penetrates the least. So at a single point on the sensor, the folk at Foveon have figured out how to capture signals from all three colors of light, at different depths in the silicon. This astonishing bit of science was developed by Dr. Carver Mead, a professor at CalTech.

Sigma is best known for its lenses. So, if you are going to be stuck with a single lens, it might as well be from a dedicated lens-maker.

Another point: the DP1's old-school styling. The DP1 echoes certain features of older cameras - the boxy rectangular form and the shutter speed dial on the top. You will also find this design in the Lumix L1 and the Leica M8, both DSLRs. The Lumix is 7MP, and about the same price as the Sigma, and the Leica - well, it's in its own class. It is a true M-series Leica, with 10 megapixels, and costs above five grand. Yes, US$5000+. So, I'll be getting that... never.

So, why not pick up a Sigma for Xmas (since Hannukkah is almost over). Well, it costs about $1000. If you consider it a more substitute for a DSLR with better quality than most and a more portable, convenient form factor, it might be worth it.

Note: this article is not a substitute for a real review, which hasn't yet come out on DPReview.com, and which I am not equipped to perform.

So, Sigma?  Maybe if you sent me a loaner.

Peter Basch