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Mounts: why isn't the photography industry more like the consumer electronics industry?

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Pontoneer said:
It wasn’t a problem back in the 50’s and 60’s when m42 screw mount was almost universal , and people did mix and match lenses .

--
With kind regards
Derek.
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That was true when it was a simple screw mout with one pin to close the lens down.

Once some sort of automation started we then had different versions of the screw mount, not fully compatible with each other.

Pentax had the ES, Fujica had the ST, Praktica had the PL and EE, Ricoh the TLS EE, Olympus the FTL and Exakta (Petri made) had their own version too.

The reason why there were then more than 20 brands selling K mount bodies was that there was no copyright fee and they were all made by a few brands only, mostly Ricoh and Cosina, and then re-badged as somethig else.
 
The first major thing you missed is the superior video format, in terms of video quality, lost! VHS was an inferior format in terms of video quality! Would you want to use Casio lenses on your Canikon camera (if Casio were to win the format wars)?

The other major thing you missed in terms of videos is the software, the videos...the studios didn't want to produce a VHS, Beta, Laser Disk, DVD, Blueray, HD-DVD, CDV, etc. etc. etc. For instance more and more studios dropped Beta after a while. Years later some studios only produced Blueray while others only HD-DVD.

The same thing did happen with film...there used to be all sorts of consumer film formats, 35mm/135, 126, 110, disk, etc. Those latter formats were phased out and replaced with APS in auto load cameras.

But these days camera manufacturers don't need to depend on third parties to produce film and batteries for their cameras...they have their own lenses, their own flashes, and their own batteries, and they can mark them up accordingly. Yes there are third party lens, flash, and battery manufacturers but the camera makers don't have to depend on them.

And the things that camera do depend on third parties to manufacture, namely tripods, the camera manufacturers DO use the same standard screw thread, 1/4-20!
 
Leonard Migliore said:
dwalby said:
when Canon designs a system, they design it the way they want to, for whatever reason they want to. Their only goal is to make their lenses work on their bodies, so the mount doesn't have to be universal.

If any other lenses happen to be compatible with the Canon mount, that takes business away from Canon's lens sales, so they have no incentive to make the mount support other brands of lenses.

If you design a DVD, Blu-ray, whatever player, it will need to support whatever format the media content is produced with, and the company producing the media isn't the same company that is producing the player. If your player doesn't support an entire segment of the media, you will lose sales because nobody wants a player that supports some of the formats, but not all of them. Its a totally different market.
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Exactly right. And, in a photographic example, you could put the same film in any 35mm camera because it would have been economic suicide to make a camera that needed special film.

--
Leonard Migliore
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Unless it was an instamatic or disc camera. Although Kodak did allows others to use the format.
 
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starbase218 said:
We have so many different mounts, and all but one - at least that I can think of - are owned by one company that produces both bodies and lenses for that system. The sole exception is micro 4/3 (I know M42 was popular as well but I'm talking about current systems) for which both Panasonic and Olympus make bodies and lenses. And it seems like a very wise decision to do that: as a company, you don't have support the mount all by yourself, a good lens has a much wider target audience to sell to, and a good body can be used with a lot of existing lenses.
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your assumptions there are not correct, because panasonic made their dfd af system proprietary, so that only panasonic brand lenses can use it.

if you put an oly lens on most panasonic bodies, it will mount up, but you'll be relegated to using slow cdaf only... no ospdaf of course, because panasonic doesn't do ospdaf, and no dfd.
 
Leonard Migliore said:
dwalby said:
when Canon designs a system, they design it the way they want to, for whatever reason they want to. Their only goal is to make their lenses work on their bodies, so the mount doesn't have to be universal.

If any other lenses happen to be compatible with the Canon mount, that takes business away from Canon's lens sales, so they have no incentive to make the mount support other brands of lenses.

If you design a DVD, Blu-ray, whatever player, it will need to support whatever format the media content is produced with, and the company producing the media isn't the same company that is producing the player. If your player doesn't support an entire segment of the media, you will lose sales because nobody wants a player that supports some of the formats, but not all of them. Its a totally different market.
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Exactly right. And, in a photographic example, you could put the same film in any 35mm camera because it would have been economic suicide to make a camera that needed special film.
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In the case of digital cameras the videotape would be analogous to SD cards and not lens mounts... it makes sense that different cameras have different philosophies behind their design so different lens mounts... but the same (or mostly the same) media because that's the kind of thing that's shared across different brands.



There are some examples though of companies partnering with each other and sharing the same mount, like with m43...
 
Aaron801 said:
Leonard Migliore said:
dwalby said:
when Canon designs a system, they design it the way they want to, for whatever reason they want to. Their only goal is to make their lenses work on their bodies, so the mount doesn't have to be universal.

If any other lenses happen to be compatible with the Canon mount, that takes business away from Canon's lens sales, so they have no incentive to make the mount support other brands of lenses.

If you design a DVD, Blu-ray, whatever player, it will need to support whatever format the media content is produced with, and the company producing the media isn't the same company that is producing the player. If your player doesn't support an entire segment of the media, you will lose sales because nobody wants a player that supports some of the formats, but not all of them. Its a totally different market.
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Exactly right. And, in a photographic example, you could put the same film in any 35mm camera because it would have been economic suicide to make a camera that needed special film.
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In the case of digital cameras the videotape would be analogous to SD cards and not lens mounts... it makes sense that different cameras have different philosophies behind their design so different lens mounts... but the same (or mostly the same) media because that's the kind of thing that's shared across different brands.

There are some examples though of companies partnering with each other and sharing the same mount, like with m43...
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That m43s IS a current system, and doing pretty well, I might add.
 
starbase218 said:
I was just looking at this Youtube video about Betamax and VHS and I started to wonder: Sony eventually started to produce VHS machines, just like Philips gave up on V2000 and did the same thing. Later, HD-DVD and Blu-ray fought a similar battle with the latter coming out on top and companies like Toshiba jumping from the dead HD-DVD format onto the Blu-ray bandwagon.
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Your example is storage medium. Photography uses industry standard storage. VCRs and Bluray players don't have different lenses needed 🙄
You've confused components and storage mediums
 
Mike CH said:
mamallama said:
FrancoD said:
mamallama said:
The photography industry is more like Apple - keep things propriety and squeeze more money out of consumers.
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Should it be more like Microsoft ?
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Yes, it should be more like Bill Gates who is giving away a good portion of his fortune to charity.
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The founder of a company and a company are two rather different things, as seen by the example of Microsoft....
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The overall scheme is sort of a Robin Hood effect with Bill Gates being Robin Hood. :-)
Mike CH said:
Regards, Mike

--
Wait and see...
I hardly ever speak for anybody but myself. In the cases where I do mean to speak generally the statements are likely to be marked as such.
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mamallama said:
Mike CH said:
mamallama said:
FrancoD said:
mamallama said:
The photography industry is more like Apple - keep things propriety and squeeze more money out of consumers.
Click to expand...
Should it be more like Microsoft ?
Click to expand...
Yes, it should be more like Bill Gates who is giving away a good portion of his fortune to charity.
Click to expand...
The founder of a company and a company are two rather different things, as seen by the example of Microsoft....
Click to expand...
The overall scheme is sort of a Robin Hood effect with Bill Gates being Robin Hood. :-)
Click to expand...
It's more of an Andrew Carnegie effect, where he stole from everyone and gave some of it back to everyone as charity.

I do appreciate what Gates is doing now; it's honorable and good for humanity.
 
Leonard Migliore said:
mamallama said:
Mike CH said:
mamallama said:
FrancoD said:
mamallama said:
The photography industry is more like Apple - keep things propriety and squeeze more money out of consumers.
Click to expand...
Should it be more like Microsoft ?
Click to expand...
Yes, it should be more like Bill Gates who is giving away a good portion of his fortune to charity.
Click to expand...
The founder of a company and a company are two rather different things, as seen by the example of Microsoft....
Click to expand...
The overall scheme is sort of a Robin Hood effect with Bill Gates being Robin Hood. :-)
Click to expand...
It's more of an Andrew Carnegie effect, where he stole from everyone and gave some of it back to everyone as charity.
Click to expand...
It's the Robin Hood effect using the Andrew Carnegie methodology.
Leonard Migliore said:
I do appreciate what Gates is doing now; it's honorable and good for humanity.

--
Leonard Migliore
Click to expand...
 
Leonard Migliore said:
mamallama said:
Mike CH said:
mamallama said:
FrancoD said:
mamallama said:
The photography industry is more like Apple - keep things propriety and squeeze more money out of consumers.
Click to expand...
Should it be more like Microsoft ?
Click to expand...
Yes, it should be more like Bill Gates who is giving away a good portion of his fortune to charity.
Click to expand...
The founder of a company and a company are two rather different things, as seen by the example of Microsoft....
Click to expand...
The overall scheme is sort of a Robin Hood effect with Bill Gates being Robin Hood. :-)
Click to expand...
It's more of an Andrew Carnegie effect, where he stole from everyone and gave some of it back to everyone as charity.

I do appreciate what Gates is doing now; it's honorable and good for humanity.
Click to expand...
It is also only the beginning of an atonement for the train wreck situation he and his company has created in in the IT industry. A very profitable train wreck not only for his company, but also for others, but still a train wreck of immense proportions regarding in particular but not only security. The company has started cleaning it up in the last couple of years, but it would have been better had it never occurred.

Regards, Mike
 
Sorry I didn't respond more. I was kind of caught up in other things. But I'd like to thank everyone for these contributions.
 
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