Originally posted by Nicolas06 Man the 18-55 and 70-300 have an apperture lever. It is was sooo costly it would prevent cheap lenses to exist. In practice they are the majority of sales. Bundled to a new entry level body a 18-55 is paid as low a 50$ at time.
The apperture lever of K mount is very old, entirely specified and is no longer protected so you don't need to licence anything to make it work.
On the opposite, anything requiring KAF4 will need a licence from Pentax with the associated cost. It will also need to implement a dedicated chip able to understand the camera protocol and maybe even a way to update the lens firmware with the release of new bodies. This is far more complex and costly.
Oh, you can reverse engineer, that what sigma is doing. And on a regular basis their lenses have issues with the new bodies. It occurs huge cost for them to take back the lens free of charge and update their firmware.
Using the mechanical apperture lever is much less risky and much less expensive.
That wasnt what i meant, at this point Ricoh/Pentax must have the mechanical aperture lever pretty much settle beetween the engineers and manufacturing of lenses, and a very wide stock of them...
But i mean, that in the middle long term, when Pentax start using the KAF4 as a regular basis (it cant force the introduction now, as the mayority of the user base dont have a camera with compatibility with the system), the KAF4 it must be more affordable to produce and introduce at the lines, it wont need engineers to double check tolerances and possibly avoid light meter issue cause a faulty lever, if Ricoh license this mount, maybe other lens manufacturers absorbs the hate of drop the KAF3 mount and force the user base to adopt newer cameras, and then safely drop that mount.
At the end of this, all of this are savings in the cost of production, no lever, no metal construction, everything sums for a more affordable price lens.... i hope some day i can see a DFA*135 f1.8 but doenst cost 2k or more, up to 1.2k is my budget for this lens in the future, but who knows.....