I remember hearing the legend that in era of film SLRs, Sigma did not
purchase the information on the K-mounts AF interface from Pentax and was
reverse-engineering it for the purpose of their (Sigma's) K-mount lenses.
I don't know if that was fully correct or an urban legend.
I am guessing you, Alex, might be referring to that here.
One of my questions after reading Mark's initial message about this lens
and the KAF4 was also related to the interview referenced by Matthew and
Bipin. But my question was: if the KAF4 was in the working, and it was
already implemented as early as K-3 (IIRC it came out before K-S1), which
is Spring 2014, i.e. 2 years ago, -- did it really go for two (2!!!) years
under everybody's radar unnoticed?
1. Did nobody (Sigma, Tokina) notice that feature in the bodies? Really?!
Or did they notice but held back any type of design effort until the first
Pentax lenses would show up, to make it easier to replicate the behavior?
2. Did Pentax intentionally keep it secret?
3. Does it mean that Pentax/Ricoh is again going to play hardball,
limiting 3rd party players's ability to produce lenses with KAF4?
I understand that they might think that such a policy increases their
sales (and profits) from the new lenses (that are still scarce and will
likely remain that way for some time). But that also may sway away some
potential buyers who would buy a camera first with cheaper 3rd party
lenses, and then get hooked on the system, and will continue buying Pentax
lenses.
That's how I got to Pentax: bought ZX-5n because of its ergonomics,
together with a very nice Tokina ATX Pro 28-70/2.6-2.8. Then, soon, I
bought Tamron 70-300. And in the subsequent 18 years, I bought a bunch of
Pentax-made lenses and DSLR bodies.
Writing about this made me counting: Throughout almost 20 years of using
K-mount, I bought:
5 3rd-party lenses (2 Tokinas, 1 Tamron, 1 sigma (used), 1 Samyang) and
9 Pentax lenses, including 4 primes (2 used) and 5 zooms (1 used),
1 SLR, 3 DSLRs.
I also bought 2 Pentax top-of-the-line flashes and 1 non-Pentax one.
While it is definitely a [much] smaller set of lenses and cameras then
some PDMLers bought, I would think it is above the average for K-mount
camera buyers.
So, I assume, "luring" me in with non-Pentax lenses on a Pentax camera
was good for Pentax.
Igor
Alex Sarbu Tue, 14 Jun 2016 12:08:15 -0700 wrote:
Obviously, that it's too expensive to reverse engineer the new
electronic aperture control protocol ;-)
Alex
On Tue, Jun 14, 2016 at 12:53 PM, Bipin Gupta wrote:
Just some two months back, 3rd Party Lens Manufacturers were
complaining that do not do too many Pentax Lenses because of the
mechanical Aperture coupling.
I wonder what excuse they will now use, that Ricoh - Pentax have made
life easier for them with the electronic Aperture coupling??
Regards
Bipin
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