Yes, you and I will always have cameras made by camera companies. We were here before the digital camera craze began, and we'll be here long after it has passed. But, people like us buy only so many cameras in a lifetime, and people like us can support only so many camera companies. Much of the actual money is in the mass market, and they are moving on. Ironically, Kodak (the company that basically invented the entire industry) is largely past-tense, and this article is stating the obvious, that many more companies will follow in their path, and the (small) set of survivors is not yet clear, and that may affect us.

For example, there is a "religious war" brewing between those who will stick with the SLR style, and those who like the new mirror-less style. I mention that with trepidation because I really, really do not want to fight that battle here ... but that also affects this question. If Olympus and Sony would sell enough mirrorless cameras, that would affect the profits of Nikon and Canon, and thus it would affect the resources they could invest in pushing their technology forward, and that would affect what is available to us.

:thumbdown: :thumbdown: :thumbdown:We had an old Windows XP computer that we kept only because I needed it to run a Nikon LS-2000 scanner that I had bought (reconditioned) on eBay. When we moved from Massachusetts to Indiana, my wife insisted that the old computer be left behind, so she agreed to my buying a Plustek. After we completed the move, I was able to take over my Dad's old XP box, and re-activate the LS-2000, because the Plustek totally failed on under exposed slides, while the LS-2000 handled them in stride.
I have just enough "important" under exposed slides that this really mattered to me.
Of course, if your slides are all perfect, then this won't matter to you, but I'm not in a position to ditch my "marginal" stuff.
The combination of a Plustek scanner attached to a newer computer certainly does get the job done much faster than the LS-2000 attached to an old XP computer.

A four-thirds sensor (17.3 x 13.0) is only half the size of a
"standard" sensor (36.0 x 24.0), and smaller even than a
cropped sensor (22.3 x 14.9)... I'm not sure how well the old
rules work, but I'd need some real convincing before spending over
a thousand dollars for a camera like that. I'm not criticizing any one
else's experience, but that is a matter of concern for me.

I guess I need to look at the EM1 then - and if I ever have any spare money lying around ...

In general, camera manufacturers compete on
(1) size of camera (small is good)
(2) megapixels
(3) size of LCD (small is bad)

(1) and (3) are in natural conflict, and including an optical viewfinder [from that viewpoint] just takes up space that could be occupied by LCD, so of course it has to go; besides, younger consumers are accustomed to looking at the world through an LCD. However, that entire audience will stop buying cameras soon, because the camera built into their phone will be good enough.

I recently did a comparison of cropped sensor mirror-less cameras and closely related DSLR cropped sensor cameras. I found just two reasons for me to be leary of the mirror-less cameras:

(1) I spent fifty years becoming proficient in the use of film cameras; much of that had to do with holding the camera very still while looking through the (optical) viewfinder. My elbows are planted on my body when I take a picture and my forearms are almost vertical; in that position, camera weight is not really an issue - if anything it helps - and any motion has virtually no effect on the picture. Using an LCD viewfinder, my forearms are more out-stretched, more diagonal, and I find it harder to hold the camera still; I suppose image stabilization helps there, but it is a correction for a problem that I never had before. I also have alot of trouble seeing an LCD viewfinder in bright light. For these reasons, I would still prefer an DSLR-type camera.

(2) As already mentioned, there is a much better selection of lenses for DSLR-type cameras, so you need to include the price of an adaptor when pricing the mirror-less camera.

Magic the cat during her final illness

Obviously, we have persons from several different cultures here.

24000 images is 3000 an hour, or 50 a minute, over an 8 hour day. I can't imagine performing at that rate ... but that is just me.

In the days of film, I learned to be relatively conservative in my use of film, but even then I would take two of every scene. When shooting negatives, I filed the negatives in fire-proof boxes, and the prints were in a different part of the house; when shooting slides, I put one slide in the fire-proof box, and the other was with the prints.

My use of auxiliary drives to store backups (and sometimes the cloud) is just an extension of that practice, but I'm not dealing with the volume that others are. In 2011, our daughter's (age 20 at the time) computer died on Saturday (and the guy at Best Buy said the disk was beyond restoration), and our favorite cat died on Sunday (the next day). I had made backups of some of her earlier pix of the cat, but that was an extremely painful lesson for her. I can't imagine her owning, and keeping, enough SD cards to keep every picture she has ever taken, though.

That is our story, but I understand that your solution will depend on your story. Or as they say about cars "your mileage may be different".

Magic the cat five months before she died

As a computer professional, I naturally think in terms of a system instead of in terms of individual components.

I wasn't willing to get a digital camera until I could also afford a laptop computer so I could download and save my pictures every evening. With the current cost of a basic tablet, the supporting "computer" is the cheaper part of the system.

For years, I used only Kodachrome 25 film, which was very very good in detail. When I started thinking of moving to digital, I sent some slides to a professional scanner, who returned 6mb files. I set up my projector and my computer so that I could compare each scan to each slide. One of the slides was taken at the home of a friend, who happens to be a librarian, and not surprisingly, a fair amount of printed material was in the picture. I could find no detail in the slide that was not also in the scan. Based on that experiment, I really doubt if your 14mb scans are a problem; even at that level, they probably contain more detail than the slides actually have.