Common sense on photo equipment production

[Joel Tlumak <JT@JMBM.COM>]

Attitudes and beliefs are so strong that often a little bit of truth
carries an attitude and a belief over the edge of common
sense.  Japanese industry makes no bones about it adopting
ideas and improving upon those ideas -- improving their
marketability and/or improving their use and convenience.  I
don't think anyone denies this and I believe Japanese industry
prides itself on turning around someone else's ideas.  

However, this great ability to develop others' ideas has also
developed into the ability to create high quality products as
well as mass quality products for those ideas.  The U.S.
industry has been copying Japanese industrial concepts and
profiting from them.  And this is what Leica is doing by
contracting out to Japanese companies for parts for its SLRs. 

No matter how great ideas may be, their implementation and
continued development are what give those ideas value.  

I know one of the cameras I treasure, my Nikonos, was not
germinated by Nikon, but Nikon, not a European company,
developed the camera and made it a mainstay for underwater
and inclement weather photography.  No one can say that the
Nikonos is not a high quality Japanese camera.  And the
Nikonos family was obviously the seed for the very expensive
high quality Nikon underwater SLR.  No European company
makes comparable cameras of this type.  

I don't think this is an unimportant question for this users
group, especially since Leica has entered into the autofocus
field where Japanese industry has paved the way.  Many
LUGgers may snicker at autofocus, but it is a fact of
photographic life -- and a very important fact.  And Canon and
Nikon having copyied Leica and Nikon rangefinders does not
make those cameras inferior to their originators.  In point of
fact, the many lovers of Contax rangefinder equipment, I've
been told, prefer to use their Zeiss lenses on Nikon
rangefinder bodies. And while I treasure my Leica
screwmount cameras, I cannot see any deterioration in the
screwmount concept in my Canon copies.  On the contrary,
both my Canon rangefinders are superior in features to my
Leica IIIf and they are as rugged as the Leica bodies they had
been copied  from.  And Canon and Nikon copied optics are
not only very good lenses, but in some cases superior to what
Leica and Contax produced.

Whether our friendship with Japan is based on the import of
Japanese mass goods into the U.S. is, in my view, stretching
some points (but it may have some validity), but the fact is that
photographically Japanese companies are at the forefront of
making photographic equipment, low quality amateur
equipment and high quality professional equipment.  And no
one can dispute this.  Preference, of course, is another
question and a major question here on the LUG.  People have
every right to prefer any brand of equipment and I respect that
judgment, regardless of whether I may object to some of the
reasons behind that preference.  But I think that
making individual preference the basis for broad general
statements of quality is carrying believability beyond the edge
of reasonable discussion.