Nikon could just go out and buy many thousends of F6 bodies from
distributors, and modify those.
Osku, from what I understant, that's what they're already doing on the S3: buying N80 bodies wholesale. Nikon lets them buy larger than normal quantities of some service parts, like D100 white shutter curtains for D-TTL, and F100 remote jacks, but that's it.
Would be more expensive and
disassembly would cost too,
That's pretty much what the insides of S2 and S3 already look like, complere N80 bodies, dismantled, clamshells discarded, some extra mounting holes drilled to secure sensor and processor boards, and then reassembled in Fuji's cast clamshells. Not cheap cameras to build.
but in fact there is nothing Nikon
could do to stop it. Nothing.
Unfortunatly, I think Nikon may already have done something to stop it. Not intentionally or maliciously, but just as a consequence of how F6 is built.
First, N80 used a standard Nikon 10 zone meter, which is 5 large photodiodes, four of which basically quarter the screen and the fifth cuts a mostly circular chunk out of the other 4 (the other 5 zones are "spots" from the AF sensors, a neat trick Nikon's been using since 8008s). If you mask off that metering system, you cut the area of the outer 4 cells in half, they still operate but generate a bit less photocurrent, so you just increase gain a bit to compensate, and the metering system works (matrix metering makes worse decisions, though).
F6 uses a 1005 zone meter. When you mask off the viewfinder for a 1.5x crop sensor, about 560 of the 1005 cells are blocked off totally, and 445 cells are actually exposed. So the matrix meter sees the scene as a bright rectangle in the center of a large black area. What does that look like? A portrait against a black background. It doesn't matter what kind of scene your're actually photographing, to the messed up matrix, it's now a portrait.
So, unless Fuji builds a full frame camera, they're not using F6 unless they get Nikon's help to either change to a smaller sensor that concentrates on the cropped area, or Nikon writes new firmware to allow metering decisions to be based only on the cropped sensor area.
The second issue, N80 had a rather uncomplicated internal interface to the upper processor (the one that runs metering, auto exposure, the shutter, and the control interface for all the upper panel knobs and switches). F6 is a nightmare, it depends very heavily on its back LCD and buttons. Fuji would have to reverse engineer all that to get into the F6 control system.
So if e.g. Fuji says we want 200 000
those but cripled and Nikon can get the same profit per body even
with the crippled ones, I assume Nikon has no problem with that.
They could even get better profits... who knows.
That aside, there has been plenty of talk why Nikon will allow Fuji
to sell what it wants, to me this kind of thinkin is as clever as
"why would canon allow you to drink orange juice?". They can not
do anything about it, so you drink if you like. Same goes with
modifying cameras...
Until those cameras become so complicated that you can't modify themselves anymore.
If your refrigerator had a complex locking mechanism built by Canon, you would have have to beg Canon to let you have some orange juice.
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