It sounds like a plausible enough argument. But I could also argue the
other side as well. These parts do cost money. And the mechanical
linkage has to be carried into the lens assembly as well. So not only
do you have to add that cost to the body, but to the future lens line as
well. Pentax may have looked at the future and it was clearly being
written by its competitors, who have moved on to a more electronic based
linkage. Setting the aperture on the body has become the norm. I'm
glad Pentax implemented the green button though of course, but they
could have done a better job of it.
rg
P. J. Alling wrote:
Bad analysis, marketing doesn't drop features that don't cost real
money. (This didn't cost real money, the R&D was already paid for and
the part costs pennies, once the tooling is built, there is no real
further cost, and it would have been no harder to design the mount to
accept the aperture simulator cam). Marketing drops features that cost
sales. Some products last, in marketing terms, forever. Lenses are one
of those products. I expect that Pentax engineering originally kept the
metering cam, it's existence was hinted at in all the *ist-D advance
literature, (the web is quite good for re-writing history, most of those
original on line documents are gone now), marketing didn't want to be
competing with earlier Pentax and 3rd party lenses, many of which work
just fine on the *ist-D. So they decided to make the K/M lenses
obsolete. They didn't count on the storm of protest that erupted here
and on all the Japanese Pentax lists. The green button and AE-Lock
kludge was easy to implement, (maybe the software team didn't think so,
but who asked them), so that's how they decided to quell the storm. It
seems to have worked very well for them.
Gonz wrote:
