Will FE mount optical formulae work in a Z mount environment?

[cyuill2007]

Canon has been quicker to abandon lens mounts than the other camera makers. Their main mount in the 1960s (?), 1970s, and 1980s was the FD mount. They abandoned that mount after they introduced the EF mount in the mid-1980s. That Nikon kept using the F-mount for so long (late 1950s to recently) is quite amazing.

Abandoning the Nikon 1 system was a real shame. It was a fun, (literally) little system to use that still has its enthusiasts. (I still have all of my Nikon 1 gear.) Z-system users have benefited from lessons learned by Nikon from the Nikon 1 system.

My first SLR was a Canon FT-QL in 1969 and that had the FL breech lock mount. You would put the lens in place and turn the mounting ring at the back of the lens to lock it in. It was a great idea because if a bayonet mount wore with age, it could become loose, but with a breech lock mount, you'd just turn the mounting ring a bit more to take up any slack.

They gave that up for a more standard bayonet mount. I remember reading about the mechanical gymnastics the lens had to go through because to maintain compatibility, the outer barrel had to rotate to mount while the inner barrel had to stay fixed. I never saw anything that explained why this was any better. I think bayonet mounts were more popular and so it was a marketing thing rather than a technical one.

For a number of months I had my heart set on purchasing a Canon AE-1 as my first camera. This was around the time that Canon’s transition from the breach lock to bayonet was well underway. I never did buy that AE-1. I changed my mind about what I wanted and ended up getting an Olympus OM-1 instead. Years later my Olympus gear got stolen during a B&E, and I replaced it with Nikon gear.

 

[Mr Bolton]

Canon has been quicker to abandon lens mounts than the other camera makers. Their main mount in the 1960s (?), 1970s, and 1980s was the FD mount. They abandoned that mount after they introduced the EF mount in the mid-1980s. That Nikon kept using the F-mount for so long (late 1950s to recently) is quite amazing.

Abandoning the Nikon 1 system was a real shame. It was a fun, (literally) little system to use that still has its enthusiasts. (I still have all of my Nikon 1 gear.) Z-system users have benefited from lessons learned by Nikon from the Nikon 1 system.

My first SLR was a Canon FT-QL in 1969 and that had the FL breech lock mount. You would put the lens in place and turn the mounting ring at the back of the lens to lock it in. It was a great idea because if a bayonet mount wore with age, it could become loose, but with a breech lock mount, you'd just turn the mounting ring a bit more to take up any slack.

They gave that up for a more standard bayonet mount. I remember reading about the mechanical gymnastics the lens had to go through because to maintain compatibility, the outer barrel had to rotate to mount while the inner barrel had to stay fixed. I never saw anything that explained why this was any better. I think bayonet mounts were more popular and so it was a marketing thing rather than a technical one.

The breech lock has always been an issue for me because it's not always certain to lock in and clear all the little levers and such that it needs to. Once I dropped a 400mm FD lens with 2x teleconverter six feet onto pavement when the breech lock ring was locked, yet somehow after carrying the whole thing from car to shoot, it.. wasn't.

Remarkably, the lens survived unscathed, a testament to Canon's durable construction back then. However Canon switched to bayonet mount because it's a better idea. IMHO, anyway.

 

[Born2Code]

Canon has been quicker to abandon lens mounts than the other camera makers. Their main mount in the 1960s (?), 1970s, and 1980s was the FD mount. They abandoned that mount after they introduced the EF mount in the mid-1980s. That Nikon kept using the F-mount for so long (late 1950s to recently) is quite amazing.

Abandoning the Nikon 1 system was a real shame. It was a fun, (literally) little system to use that still has its enthusiasts. (I still have all of my Nikon 1 gear.) Z-system users have benefited from lessons learned by Nikon from the Nikon 1 system.

My first SLR was a Canon FT-QL in 1969 and that had the FL breech lock mount. You would put the lens in place and turn the mounting ring at the back of the lens to lock it in. It was a great idea because if a bayonet mount wore with age, it could become loose, but with a breech lock mount, you'd just turn the mounting ring a bit more to take up any slack.

They gave that up for a more standard bayonet mount. I remember reading about the mechanical gymnastics the lens had to go through because to maintain compatibility, the outer barrel had to rotate to mount while the inner barrel had to stay fixed. I never saw anything that explained why this was any better. I think bayonet mounts were more popular and so it was a marketing thing rather than a technical one.

The breech lock has always been an issue for me because it's not always certain to lock in and clear all the little levers and such that it needs to. Once I dropped a 400mm FD lens with 2x teleconverter six feet onto pavement when the breech lock ring was locked, yet somehow after carrying the whole thing from car to shoot, it.. wasn't.

Remarkably, the lens survived unscathed, a testament to Canon's durable construction back then. However Canon switched to bayonet mount because it's a better idea. IMHO, anyway.

It might have been if they'd started with a new bayonet mount, not that mechanically bizarre hybrid. I never had trouble with the breech lock, but I didn't have many lenses back then.

 

[Thom Hogan]

Thom, I was talking about Nikon 1 as a product line was losing money year after year, not the Nikon Imaging Products as a whole was losing money year after year.

Simply didn't happen in the first two or three years.

Despite the Japan earthquake in 2011 and the Thai flood that damaged Nikon's factory in late 2011,

Nikon managed to introduce the D4 in January 2012 (ahead of the London Summer Olympics) and the D800/D800E in February.

Sure, but those would show up in the 2013 Nikon results, as Nikon's fiscal year is skewed by one. In the 2012 results, quite a bit of that was a huge Nikon 1 push to make up for not being able to deliver anything else.

It didn't take Nikon Thailand that long to recover.

Well, if you consider six to nine months "not long." Note also, that Nikon's suppliers had to recover, too. The whole D600 shutter problem that occurred right after that is most likely due to the supplier, not Nikon, for instance.

Of course hindsight is always 20/20, but all Nikon 1" sensor products were failures.

You're going to have to define "failure" for me, then. Initial sales were quite robust. Reception was mixed, sure, but there were some real positives in the early Nikon 1 sales, including an uptick in sales to women.

Nikon 1 never took off. Besides the J1, I also received a Nikon 1 AW (all weather, underwater) camera and two AW lenses for testing. That thing leaked into the rear LCD underwater. The DL line was announced and then delayed,

The DL was 2016, fairly late in the Nikon 1 life cycle, actually.

and finally Nikon cancelled the entire DL product line altogether a year after the announcement without ever shipping any production unit.

Nikon says it was because the EXPEED processor couldn't deliver what the DL's promised, but I suspect it was far more than that: At that point Nikon had decided to stop both the Nikon 1 and virtually all of the Coolpix models. Nikon executives were consistently talking about "overcapacity" at that point, and, of course, they eventually wrote off more than half of that capacity.

The KeyMission products were also a major failure.

The KeyMission products were the opposite of the Nikon 1 in terms of success/failure. The GoPro clone and the 360 were actually quite competitive, but sales failures from the get go. The problem with the Nikon 1 line eventually became they weren't as good as they needed to be once Sony went all mirrorless, but they were sales successes initially.

I would also point out that Nikon's marketing costs in the 2014 to 2018 period were quite high as Nikon tried to fight the camera sales decline. With KeyMission, for instance, Nikon was paying BestBuy a great deal of money to promote them with end cases and extra stocking, but they didn't sell.
Thing is, a refreshed KeyMission 180 (brought up to current GoPro/DJI/Inst360 standards) would actually help round out Nikon's "cinema" thrust.

But a recurrent problem for Nikon is that they're simply not a consumer company. They just are not cut out to compete in the lower end market (and never were, despite them thinking they were). Without fixing that flaw, Coolpix, KeyMission, Nikon 1, and perhaps even Z DX are pretty much doomed to failure long term, regardless of how good the product might be or how many they might be able to force through the channels.

 

[Mr Bolton]

Canon has been quicker to abandon lens mounts than the other camera makers. Their main mount in the 1960s (?), 1970s, and 1980s was the FD mount. They abandoned that mount after they introduced the EF mount in the mid-1980s. That Nikon kept using the F-mount for so long (late 1950s to recently) is quite amazing.

Abandoning the Nikon 1 system was a real shame. It was a fun, (literally) little system to use that still has its enthusiasts. (I still have all of my Nikon 1 gear.) Z-system users have benefited from lessons learned by Nikon from the Nikon 1 system.

My first SLR was a Canon FT-QL in 1969 and that had the FL breech lock mount. You would put the lens in place and turn the mounting ring at the back of the lens to lock it in. It was a great idea because if a bayonet mount wore with age, it could become loose, but with a breech lock mount, you'd just turn the mounting ring a bit more to take up any slack.

They gave that up for a more standard bayonet mount. I remember reading about the mechanical gymnastics the lens had to go through because to maintain compatibility, the outer barrel had to rotate to mount while the inner barrel had to stay fixed. I never saw anything that explained why this was any better. I think bayonet mounts were more popular and so it was a marketing thing rather than a technical one.

The breech lock has always been an issue for me because it's not always certain to lock in and clear all the little levers and such that it needs to. Once I dropped a 400mm FD lens with 2x teleconverter six feet onto pavement when the breech lock ring was locked, yet somehow after carrying the whole thing from car to shoot, it.. wasn't.

Remarkably, the lens survived unscathed, a testament to Canon's durable construction back then. However Canon switched to bayonet mount because it's a better idea. IMHO, anyway.

It might have been if they'd started with a new bayonet mount, not that mechanically bizarre hybrid. I never had trouble with the breech lock, but I didn't have many lenses back then.

Do you mean the breech mount being a mechanically bizarre hybrid? Because EOS EF is all electronic and always was.