What you say is certainly true for low end P&S cameras. However, the
high end stuff and DSLRs still require a competitive advantage and you
can't outsource competitive inventing. If you could the E-P1's contrast
detect autofocus would be equal to or better than the Panasonic DMC-G1
and the E1 would have had much better noise levels and much faster
autofocus. As to Sigma, I think they have a history of trying to stay
in-house. Where Tamron and Tokina paid the license fees Sigma tried to
reverse engineer Canon autofocus. They eventually got it right but it
took a while and they and the customers paid a price.
Chuck Norcutt
Ken Norton wrote:
>> I disagree. Software, sure; many great examples of folks with an idea,
>> coding skills and total commitment making it big.
>>
>
> The reason why I say this is because, frankly, digital photography has
> become a mature technology. At this point there is no need to "invent" from
> the ground up. There are fab houses to take care of any chip manufacturing,
> factories in China to build ANYTHING. Most importantly, there are
> engineering firms everywhere that will design the hardware and circuit-board
> layouts.
>
> As to the firmware in the cameras, even that doesn't need to be a ground-up
> thing anymore. Do you honestly think that "face detection" was
> simultaneously invented by 12 different camera companies? Hardly. It, and
> a myriad of other features are all modular, licenses firmware code.
>
> In the compact camera world, there are only two or three factories building
> nearly all of the compact cameras for almost all camera companies. For
> Christmas I bought my daughters a couple pocket-sized cameras. One is a
> Nikon the other is a Samsung. There are obvious differences in the
> "branding" aspect, but they both were built in the same factory using the
> same components. While researching, I discovered the same commonalities and
> sub-structures in multiple camera brands--even the lenses were the same.
>
> What Sigma could have done is outsourced the firmware production to any
> company that does the firmware for most any pocket camera. It was as though
> Sigma was trying to build this thing entirely from scratch and they just
> don't have the brains for that.
>
> Where I will agree with Moose and Chuck on this is when a company is
> engineering a greenfield technology. You can outsource the manufacturing,
> but you can't as easily outsource the inventing. I worked for a few years
> for an electronics company that did soup-to-nuts greenfield engineering to
> manufacturing to sales/support. It took no less than five years to bring a
> product from concept to market and if it was truly greenfield, it was closer
> to 10 years.
>
> AG
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