>>as to keep people with good old Pentax lenses from >> selling them in disgust and buying Canon.
>Sure, that would be the same Canon that completely abandoned their >user base once already? >At least Pentax doesn't have that in their history. >William Robb No? My M 28/2.0 cannot be persuaded to fit on my Spotmatic F. While you CAN fit old screw-mount Pentax lenses on a K-mount body with an adapter, you will get lesser features, and you can't go the other way. IIRC there is a Canon converter doodad to allow you to put old breech-lock FD lenses on an EOS, with lesser features, but you can't go the other way. Same deal. Nikon and Leica are the only companies I know of who have maintained one mount standard in their SLR lines. Minolta, Canon, and Contax switched over to go AF. Pentax switched over to go K-mount (rather late, considering the age of other bayonet-mount systems), and Olympus basically threw in the towel and went to 4/3. Of course you'll get fewer features with new and old Nikon gear but they WILL mount (other than a few real oddballs). Personally, I think Canon made the right choice. Their mount was probably the worst on the market (small, hard to operate). The new mount, with its huge bore, electronic contacts, and short focus distance, could accept a lot of lenses designed for older, smaller mounts (Nikon, for example), plus it gave them a lot of optical design freedom. The commanding technological edge Canon has right now stems partially from committing to the future rather than trying to maintain backward compatibility. Of course given their poor market share and arguably inferior technology at the time, Canon had little to lose. I'm not sure that's the case with Pentax now. It was probably the case with Pentax in 1975 when the K-mount came out. Pentax did re-issue most if not all of the SMC-T glass in "K" versions (I get the impression Canon did much the same). DJE
