Conclusion:

What to say?

The technology around the sensors is progressing every day in term of power consumation, manufacturing process (cost decrease) and sensitivity (dynamic range). The CMOS technology has closed the gap with the CCD these last two years. The trend is to use the CCD technology for the APS and smaller sensor thanks to its low backround noise. The CMOS is preferred for sensors larger than APS. The X3 technology is very interesting but needs to mature more to compete with the CCD and CMOS sensors.

The sensor is a very important part of your camera, but you should not choose your camera based only on this criterion. Once the scene is captured, a lot of post-processing is perfomed in your camera to convert the light information into a colour image. The quality of the processing is at least as important as the sensor.

Future innovations will come, but the creativity will remain in the photographer's hand!

Regards

Patrick