We're about a month-and-a-half away from Photokina, the largest of the photo industry trade shows. Photokina is held in Germany every other year, and because of it's every-other-year aspect, tends to be a fair predictor of what the camera companies are really up to.
So what's up this year? It's mostly about the space at the high end of the compacts and low end of the DSLRs (mirrorless). Quite a bit of the action right now is in this space, and that's because of what I've written about previously: cell phones are gobbling up the low-end casual camera market and high-end DSLRs are a smallish market. Everyone's decided that most of the money to be made is in the range from about the Coolpix S8000 to the D5000. Mirrorless, as you probably know, fits almost dead square in the middle of that range.
The problem I have is that I'm not convinced that the user target the camera companies are designing for is quite the right one. They look at the weaknesses of the cellphone cameras, which is mostly centered on lenses and low light performance now, so at the low end we get big lens ranges with "better" low light capability. But the camera makers are still mostly targeting the casual user with not a lot of photographic expertise, nor a lot of interest in developing much. These are the "wants magic" users.
Every camera I test in this range leaves a serious photographer wanting in some significant way. Yet it still strikes me that the most likely purchaser of cameras in this range is the serious user looking for something they can carry with them all the time. The camera companies are afraid, I think, to do something that exactly targets these users. That's because they fear that a "perfect" small camera might have them abandon their big cameras.
So we're going to get another round of near misses soon. That's okay by me as many of the near misses (E-P2, GF1, GXR, NEX5, etc.) have found ways to be useful to me. But I'm still in search of the one that'll completely satisfy me as a pocket camera. I'm pretty sure that won't appear at this year's Photokina, but there will be a lot of contenders that try (LX5, G12, P7000, and more).