I might agree with you on digital point-and-shoots, but a digital SLR such as a Canon or Nikon has fast auto-focus and good manual-focus capabilities--just as good as similar film SLR's. Tyler Hicks, for example, had a digital SLR--see
this page. Both the Cornell and Auburn teams have posted pages of photos--they know how to use their cameras.
I've taken thousands of photos with a manual focus film SLR, and over 15,000 with a digital SLR. The digital has a huge advantage in speed--there is no down-time for changing film, and no down-time for processing--errors in exposure can be corrected immediately. On a 1 gigabyte card, now costing about $50, one can take 300 photos on a typical digital SLR--that is about 9 rolls of film, which means no losing valuable time while rewinding and loading 9 rolls. Digital SLR's are now cheap, less than $1,000 new, and older ones can be had on keh.com for $300 used. And if the Cornell and Auburn teams don't have good equipment, I'd have to ask what they are doing with all that grant money.
There's the rub. If a population is spread too thin, bird won't be able to find mates, and the population will die out. This is feared to have happened with Bachman's Warbler, I believe.
Furthermore, woodpeckers don't live on the wing--they have to stop to forage, and they are relatively easy to see on tree trunks then. Nobody claims that except for Mary Scott and Gene Sparling in Arkansas, and Kullivan in Louisiana, who claimed to observe perched birds, but they could not write up field notes with sketches, that I have seen, or get a photo or video--2 of the 3 had cameras. All other sightings have been fleeting glimpses of a wraith-like bird. (Oh yes, Tyler Hicks saw one perched for a "millisecond".)
During the breeding season, IBWO would have to stay put, call, and drum in order to find a mate. None of this has been seen or heard. Lots of ARU recordings alleged to be calling and drumming, but no sightings of a bird perched doing that. How can that be?
The Auburn team was originally saying they must be "detecting" multiple birds. Heck, they claimed to have found birds within an hour of starting searching, or something like that.
Ivory-bills were known to live in family groups. Large woodpeckers are
easy to find while tending a nest with noisy nestlings, or leading noisy, begging fledglings about their territory. (And noisy fledglings don't get fed, so they die--that's pretty much the usual case among birds.) Jackson talks about this and is quoted
here--you can read his discussion about how noisy and social the bird was.
I just don't believe any actual, living species, can have the characteristic that it never pauses for more than an instant. And the population density would have to be quite high within the vicinity of a nest--and there would have to be successful nesting
somewhere for the species to be alive today. That's my problem with this whole fiasco--no nest found in the last 63-plus years--it just boggles the imagination. No breeding population found despite three years of intense searching in Arkansas. None in Florida after two years, despite lots of "detections".
Cheers as well.