I see no technical reason why digital photo cameras shouldn't be able to record high quality photos and movies. The storage requirements and data rates are easily met by buying faster SDHC cards (e.g. Sandisk Extreme III cards deliver 20 MB/s transfer speed).
As previously mentioned JPEG is the format of choice for high quality stock images and visually lossless at 90% compression quality. QuickTime PhotoJPEG compression is "intraframe" i.e. every frame is compressed individually and editing is therefore simple. Also the JPEG compression is already built into the camera while MPEG 4 would require additional circuits. The shooting speed of digital SLRs which currently can process 10 to 12 Megapixel at up to 15 frames per second is not required . Note that a movie size of 1280 x 720 are only 0.92 or roughly 1 Megapixels. Should be easy to handle.
| Frames per second | Mbits/s | MB/s | Minutes on 8 GB card |
|---|---|---|---|
| 24 | 40 | 5 | 25 |
| 30 | 90 | 12 | 10 |
11280 x 720 movie exported to Apple Photo - JPEG with QuickTime Pro. Quality slider set halfway between High and Best (90%). Data rates will vary depending on the complexity of the scene just like different photos result in different JPEG file sizes.
If manufacturer would choose 24 frames per second any Class 6 SDHC card (Class 6 guarantees 6 MB/s transfer speed) would be sufficient.
