[Leica] A few thoughts

[scott at adrenaline.com (Scott McLoughlin)]

The camera industry has to evolve to a "horizontally integrated" industry
like the PC industry (and some other areas of CE), or customers will have
increasingly slim pickin's.  From what I've read, there are already aspects
of this structure in the camera biz (licensing/outsourcing lenses, lens
designs, shutters, some bodies and what not).

Intel and AMD make CPUs and chipsets. Seagate and others make HD's.
Mother boards, graphic chips, cabling, BIOS, and on and on. And these
folks buy parts from others.  Few, few companies have the resources
to roll their own on all these fronts (IBM sort of) and the economics of
doing so aren't there even if you do (IBM again).

If we get some standard software, a bus architecture, some standards
(can't have just one :-) ) an active component market and so on -
then we might have a nice selection of different cameras that cater
to different needs - some RF bodies, some Contax T3 class P&S cameras,
a TLR or two, oodles of cheap DSLR's, high end DSLRs distinguished
by their build quality,  blue-tooth/WIFI electro gadget cameras, and
so on.

So let's root for Sony and Kodak and Dalsa and whoever else is making
sensors. Let's hope some enterprising folks build a digicam "OS" and
license it cheaply to camera builders. And so on. Let's hope they can
build a component industry that the camera builders can draw from to
deliver a wide variety of cameras.

Scott

feli wrote:

> [snip]
>
> They are basically dependent on buying commodity chips from companies  
> like Kodak etc. and I highly doubt that they will be able to purchase  
> something as cutting edge as what's in the new 5D and certainly not  
> at the prices that Canon is 'paying'.
>
> [snip]

> I suppose what I am getting at is this. Is there really any company  
> outside of Nikon and Sony that will be able to compete will Canon,  
> simply because no one else has the money or resources to develop a  
> competitive high performance imaging chip?
>
> [snip]