Ken, I'm going to rush through your points because I think discussions with you tend to get slightly bogged down. The DSLR analogy, which now seems to have derailed the thread, was purely intended to illustrate that a 1MP sensor is way behind currently, commercially available technology.
If you weren't claiming a comparison between the space imagers and those in the DAS then there was no reason to mention them as comparisons. Hence my remark.
Yes, there are plenty more factors to gaining a high quality image, but each one of them can be the weak point in the chain. If you have a low resolution imaging sensor, you CAN improve on that if you have time (back to space imagers). Trying to create an image with very low latency does not afford the luxury of time. That was, after all, one of the biggest problems with your mate's early HMDS.
You clearly understood my meaning regarding leaving full time service or you wouldn't have explained what the correct term was.
To be clear, once and for all, my concern is with the resolution of the image that the pilot sees. Assuming there aren't more issues hidden in the rest of the system, the big limitation on that image in this discussion (as it stands now) is a 1MP sensor trying to image 90 degrees FOV in a single, fast frame.
That is all.