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Canon, Nikon mirrorless = Disney and FOX on DVD
Bruce wrote:
"Neil Harrington" wrote: I agree it's an unhealthy situation if Panasonic is not being the sort of cooperative partner that it should for the good of the Micro Four Thirds standard. It is important to realise that Panasonic and Olympus are competitors, and that Panasonic's original foray into Four Thirds (not Micro) was a commercial disaster. Micro Four Thirds was Panasonic's idea and Olympus was a long way behind in developing MFT cameras and lenses. Panasonic's sensors saved Olympus' Four Thirds and Micro Four Thirds ranges from oblivion. There is no obligation on Panasonic to offer Those are details I wasn't aware of. I'm a latecomer to Micro Four Thirds and mainly got into because of the great enthusiasm of a friend for it -- he's had a G1 and GF1 for some time. He has relatively little interest in lenses actually made for the camera, but has a ball (as he puts it) using old manual focus lenses of various brands and mount types via adapters. Some of these old lenses he finds very cheap, in pawn shops. He takes 'em apart, cleans and repairs them, etc. For him m4/3 is a fun thing, not a serious photography thing. Mostly these are long lenses, there being little point in using short lenses in this way. It sounded like fun to me too, though there are no pawn shops around here and I'm not about to try taking lenses apart anyway. But there are loads of old Nikon-mount manual focus lenses on eBay, and the G1/G2 system of offering 5x or 10x magnification for manual focusing, on that magnificent 1.4-megadot EVF, made the whole idea very attractive. So I bought a G1 with the 14-45mm and 45-200mm lenses, and a cheap Nikon F adapter. Then I started collecting old Soligor lenses (from eBay, of course). The cheap adapter I bought looked too crudely made for me to want to put it on my lovely new G1, so I returned it and bought a Metabones adapter from a seller in China. That is a nice piece of work, but unfortunately I mislaid it within a day or so of receiving it (you would have to know what my apartment is like to understand this) and haven't yet found it again. But I have started seriously to clean up my apartment so it will come to the surface -- sooner or later. In the meantime I have collected a nice little battery of old Soligor lenses, the best (?) ones being a 200/3.5, 300/4.5 and 75-260/4.5 (constant aperture), all with tripod mounts and all about mint. Can't wait to try them out on the Panasonics. I've also added a G2, and a lovely Olympus 9-18 in m4/3 mount. I don't expect to add many (if any) more m4/3 lenses than that. Olympus its latest, high resolution sensors, but Olympus has definitely been held back by the 12 MP upper limit that Panasonic appears to have imposed. Really, held back? Personally I wouldn't want any more than 12 MP on a sensor of this size. But then I have no interest whatever in making super sized prints. As you say, it's an unhealthy situation, but I wouldn't want to be seen to blame one party or the other for that. That seems certain to discourage any other manufacturers from joining m4/3. It looks short-sighted to me, but then I'm not in that business of course. That's a good point. It appears Nikon has chosen a sensor slightly smaller than Panasonic and Olympus when it would surely have been just as easy to choose to follow the Micro Four Thirds standard. Maybe it would have been difficult to arrange for compatibility with AF Nikkors on an MFT body, maybe the 3:2 aspect ratio was considered too important to drop, maybe there were licensing issues - while Four Thirds is an open standard, I think some of the IP related to Micro Four Thirds is proprietary, being owned by Panasonic. Given the unhappy experience paying steep royalties to Canon for the first few years of AF-S "Silent Wave" lens production, I cannot imagine Nikon being keen to pay royalties to Panasonic for Micro Four Thirds. Probably you're right. Not being in the business I have absolutely no conception of what such royalty payments are like, or how many makers have to license which features from other manufacturers. It will be interesting to see what Canon does. Early rumours suggested a sensor size close to Micro Four Thirds but with a 3:2 aspect ratio. That sounds remarkably similar to Nikon's. Yes. I haven't heard anything about a Canon ILC at all, but since Nikon is introducing one I just assume Canon must be getting a competing product ready too. In another week or two we'll know what Nikon's is like, if reports are correct. |
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