On Aug 13, 2006, at 12:55 PM, George Sinos wrote: > Now that Sony and Samsung have Anti-shake camera bodies, I'm guessing > Canon and Nikon will, at least, need to put it in their entry level > bodies. In a couple of years, selling a consumer camera with out > Anti-shake will be like trying to sell a camera without auto-focus.
Interestingly, the very first still camera ever to offer anti-shake technology was a point and shoot film camera sold some years ago by Nikon. Like most of Nikon's point and shoot film cameras, it was actually made by a company called Goko. Surprising that it took so long for others to jump on the bandwagon. Long before this little point and shoot, image stabilization was available to professional video and motion picture film shooters in a lens called the Gyrozoom. It used a completely mechanical system with an optical wedge in the light path at the rear of the lens physically connected to very small bi-directional gyroscopes. This system worked very well and some amazing news footage was shot with it, as well as parts of some feature films. The only power required was the minimal amount to spin the gyros. Vivitar worked on a project in the 80s to use a similar system but with inertial dampers instead of gyros to reduce complexity and remove the need for batteries. They prototyped both some image stabilized zoom lenses and some binoculars. I was involved as a consultant on that project, and never understood why the management would not give the project the green light to go into production. Maybe being ten years ahead of your time just wasn't Vivitar's thing. Bob -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
