Digital Home Thoughts: Image Stabilization - Body or Lens?

"The origins of Image Stabilization for 35mm DSLR lenses lies back in the EF75-300/4-5.6IS USM which was released by Canon back in September of 1995. Prior to this Canon had shown a prototype 300/2.8 with stabilization, but the 75-300 was the first IS lens to be commercially released. The Canon EF 300/2.8L IS USM didn't make it to market until July 1999. Of course these lenses predated the adoption of digital technology by a long way. The EOS D30, the first "affordable" DSLR didn't appear until October 2000. In 1995 you could buy an EOS DCS 3, but it was 1.3MP and would have cost you around $20,000, so it didn't sell in volume! Clearly then, for film based cameras, if you wanted image stabilization you'd have to put it in the lens. Moving the film up and down and left and right would be an engineering nightmare, though Contax did move the film (rather than the lens) to focus in their unsuccessful Contax AX."

This is a really nice article and really apropos given the recent set of cameras that are being released with IS built into the body. The article talks about the history of image stabilization (IS), the advantage of IS in the lens - it can be tuned specifically for that lens, among others; and the advantage of IS in the camera body - any non-IS lens can be used and take advantage of IS. A lot of cameras are smart enough to know if the lens is an IS capable one but I wonder what would happen if an IS camera is used with an IS lens. The article also hypothesizes on the future of IS, both in cameras and in lenses. This really is an interesting read. Where would you prefer to see IS?