Patrick wrote: I very much doubt Lieca had a digital back in mind when they designed the R8 but they made the back work with it. Now if you start with that target (DSLR+FILM) in mind you are at an advantage. Pentax can save money coz they can amortise the development of the camera platform over a longer time.
>From a customer's POV you are offering customers a value proposition with respect to >upgradeability and backward compatibility. I guess that people especially cash >strapped amateurs would be prepared to pay a lttle bit extra for "resistance to >obsolesence", I know I would. Just image it you can send in your back and get it >upgraded from a 10MP to a 16MP for 25%-40% of the price of a new DSLR. A modular >design of the digital side of the camera would enable that to be possible. There may >need to be compromises e.g larger / heavier bodies. REPLY: Digital back for existing (or future for that matter) cameras are one of those things that seems like a good idea superficially (like that "digital film" thing) but is really downright stupid (in my opinion) when one start thinking about it. It is an answer to a question nobody (at least not many) asked. People who buy digital cameras usually do it in order not to use film. Those who do not buy a digital camera for this reason usually find that they stop using their comparable film cameras anyway after they aquire a digital cameras that do the same job. Digital back exist only for those products that are so borderline that fully integrated digital solutions are not (yet) financially viable, and incidentally, the digital backs in question are hardly financially viable either. For a hybrid DSLR/film to makes sense the prospective buyer must fit a host of criterias, all rather silly: a) He (or she) must want to shoot both film and digital and he must insist on doing this with exactly the one and the same body. It doesn't matter that 99,999% of customer who potentially want to shoot both film and digital with an SLR already own a perfectly useful film slr anyway, this customer obviously don't want the advantage of having separate film and digiutal bodies where one of them will presumably work after the other fails. The concept of a backup is usually considered a plus but not by this photographer. b) He must be willing to pay 50-100% more than a comparable DSLR alone costs. c) He will accept a engineering nightmare of a camera as a DSLR and film slr's set totally different demands on a camera. This camera will not be a particularly great DSLR or a great film slr. Oh...and he will be willing to take the weight penalty like having to carry the dead weight and added complexity of carrying a film transport when shooting digitally. Like that Leica that will turn into a DSLR with film wind lever..... The argument of modular design as a cheap insurance of backwards compatibility doesn't hold water. For digital it will be overwhelmingly expensive. The modular approach didn't even work well for film cameras where such a move costed significantly less. Even the pro cameras, once signatured by modular features, are now without it all together. Look at Nikons from the F from 1959 to the new F6. The last to go was the interchangeable finders. I don't really like this development but when you look at the history of the slr you'll see that it is the total intergration of a feature the really means sucesss. As soon as a feature is treated as an accessory or an add-on it either flop or doesn't really take off. Examples are autofocus, motor drives and winders and even electronic features activated by cards. AF was originally treated like another feature for existing cameras (eg. Nikon F3 and Pentax ME-F) but didn't take off wholesale until Minolta integrated it into a whole system a! nd created the concept of "autofocus camera". Only relatively minor percentage of eg. Pentax ME buyers bought a winder for it. 15 years later every camera had one built in an almost every one of them were smaller an lighter than an ME with a winder. Note that cameras with built in motors doesn't have a manual film winding. The engineers probably figured out that the reason you bought a camera with motor drive was in order not to have to wind the film manually. Quite reasonable. It is also cheaper meaning you get more for less a formula that is usually sucessful even if some find it regretful. Minolta tried to enable the user to customize their camera by buying cards that reprogrammed certain aspects of the camera. However, as electronics are cheap and there really is no end for wht you can program into a chip with no significant effect on cost anyway, so such solutions are just a waste of money. A total intergration is in the end cheaper and it also make it possible for an! engineer to tailor the product and maximize its performance for its i ntended usage. Digital is an even more fundamental "feature" than all the others and treating it as modular add on is doomed to fail or becoming an expensive also ran. Pål
