My simple solution would have been to drop the linkage on any further
lenses that didn't implement the aperture ring, (oh yes they did that
didn't they), simple solution. No one was going to buy one of them to
use on their classic film camera anyway, with no way to control the
diaphragm mechanism. There's still a dearth of lenses available.
Another reason that Pentax D-SLR sales are not meeting expectations. If
you buy Canon or Nikon you have full lines of lenses. So most users
won't buy more than the kit zoom, they're still available. Pentax, well
Pentaximaging (USA) shows a full line of both primes and zooms but try
to buy them.
Gonz wrote:
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:
--
When you're worried or in doubt,
Run in circles, (scream and shout).
