On 2/04/03 6:01 PM, "Bruce Rubenstein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> It's all being done for style, and no > different than tail fins. If that's what folks want then that's fine. It > just won't help how well it works. Very amateurish way of looking at the engineering design from the person who claims to have an engineering/design background. It is true that a good engineer should never look at anything for granted and try to look at things from different angles, but I have to repeat that this particular design is not a rocket science. There are lot more complicated design in any of the small electro-mechanical gadget like a camera. My interpretation is that, when engineers (never mind Pentax or not) encounter the conflicting design requirement to pack an extending zoom barrel into a card size format, they squeezed their brain to come up with the solution which is to get certain lens group out of its way. Normally, things like the lens alignment etc preoccupy the mind of non-creative type engineers which hinders the progress of the design. As any gadget design, there might be some bugs cropping up but I am sure the major ones were already debugged. I can see that the overall design objective of this camera was to make it as small as possible, and the lens shifting design was just one of the solutions to achieve that goal, but not the primary purpose. Pentax applied over 30 patents for this concept. I am sure there would be other applications. Well, IS woks, and why not this? I would think it is a good and useful design for the money. Tail fins? I do not think so. You may not like whatever Pentax accomplish but the life goes on regardless ;-). Take care, Ken
