[ruggiex]

The k-mount is already "open". But for Pentax to allow third-party lens calibration in-camera (such as distortion and CA control) and other future proprietary inputs would be suicide. Pentax is an optical company and requires you to buy Pentax glass to stay in the black. They are not a camera engineering firm that also happens to spin glass. They make cameras so you can use their glass. Nikon, Olympus, Fuji, and Canon are mostly the same.

Thanks for the helpful response, I guess this is the part I'm not so clear of because I still don't know the mechanics throughout the camera(if you have pointers to sites with information that'd be great). So are you saying that camera does distortion and CA correction/control based on lens ID whether you have the correction selected in the menu option or not? (Well I guess there's no CA option in the menu.) How does a 3rd party like Sigma who reverse engineers the algorithm achieve high quality output if the camera doesn't know what to do with it? Purely through optical design?

[Aristophanes]

Thanks for the helpful response, I guess this is the part I'm not so clear of because I still don't know the mechanics throughout the camera(if you have pointers to sites with information that'd be great). So are you saying that camera does distortion and CA correction/control based on lens ID whether you have the correction selected in the menu option or not? (Well I guess there's no CA option in the menu.) How does a 3rd party like Sigma who reverse engineers the algorithm achieve high quality output if the camera doesn't know what to do with it? Purely through optical design?

I think all Pentax models since the K20D have the option of in-camera distortion correction and Lat-Chromatic-Ab correction. Your Pentax camera recognizes your Pentax lens through firmware identifiers.

It's even more complex with Olympus and Panasonic and m43 where some Panny lenses only have the (almost) necessary distortion correction in a Panasonic body. It's my understanding the Fuji's x-mount has that built right in.

You can ignore these settings in your Pentax DSLR and live with or alter in your RAW editor of choice, but increasingly lenses and bodies are designed to move the lens corrections in-camera. This will include editing profiles (like with Lightroom). This is the future.

Sigma and Tamron and Zeiss and Samyang control purely through optical design and reverse engineering. How long this will last is anyone's guess because many new models of mirrorless are not amenable to reverse engineering and many lens designs therein pretty much require in-camera firmware to function with AF and even metering. Fuji is basically letting Zeiss in as a sub-contractor in a mutually beneficial relationship. Fuji needs more glass to diversify the mount and Zeiss needs a customer because Zeiss only make a single camera, a film body called the Ikon.

It is only recently than people began swapping lenses among brands (as opposed to reverse engineered third party lenses like Vivitar, Tokina, Tamron, Sears, and Sigma). I predict that we will go back in time using firmware and software and proprietary lens designs chipped only to work with brand x. This will preserve the revenue streams from each optical company. We already see that with mirrorless systems where the "right" optical performance can only be achieved with the proprietary brand regardless of how many speed boosters and eBay adapters are on the market.

At various times in the industry history third party lenses were tolerated as it is extremely costly to establish glass foundries for limited runs of odd FL's and so on. So the slack was taken up by the likes of Vivitar. But then companies would change their mount (Canon and Minolta in the 1980's) in part to stamp that out. Canon is still notorious for being difficult to reverse engineer.

I would not bet my optical company revenue stream on an open source lens mount. Even Leica has had to chip its manual focus lenses and redesign almost all of their range to account for their new sensor micro-lenses. Lenses will be more like apps, tied to the platform. Sensors may become commodities and camera bodies may be just any old consumer electronics gadget, but optics is a world unto itself both in design, manufacture, and sales. Without a locked in market for their optics via proprietary mounts, Canon, Fuji, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, and even Leica would not exist. It would be a market like cars and tires. Who really wants to make tires?

So I predict that optical performance will increasingly be tied to proprietary firmware and software accessible only by license, but that the camera as a networking platform will lean towards open source due to overhead, multiple OS's, and language compatibility.

Glass is the money.

[monochrome]

I predict that we will go back in time using firmware and software and proprietary lens designs chipped only to work with brand x. This will preserve the revenue streams from each optical company. We already see that with mirrorless systems where the "right" optical performance can only be achieved with the proprietary brand regardless of how many speed boosters and eBay adapters are on the market.

Hence Pentax's somewhat unique obsession with colored bodies - and rapid turnaround custom-color manufacturing processes - which ostensibly should increase the installed base of K-mounts (and Q mounts) in the marketplace. Ricoh couldn't care less what is wrapped around the mount; black, color, mirror or not, brick, traditional shape - who cares?. They just want to get as many mounts out into the world as they can ASAP, because increasingly this becomes a compentiton of assets-in-place scale (mounts out in the marketplace) rather than camera-body unit sales. More mounts in place -> more proprietary engineering in place -> more propreitary lenses -> more profit. In the meantime a larger installed base gives Sigma the incentive to make a (second) run of a lens in K-mount (after they do the Canon and Nikon runs).

That, anyway, is what I was told.

[Aristophanes]

Hence Pentax's somewhat unique obsession with colored bodies - and rapid turnaround custom-color manufacturing processes - which ostensibly should increase the installed base of K-mounts (and Q mounts) in the marketplace. Ricoh couldn't care less what is wrapped around the mount; black, color, mirror or not, brick, traditional shape - who cares?. They just want to get as many mounts out into the world as they can ASAP, because increasingly this becomes a compentiton of assets-in-place scale (mounts out in the marketplace) rather than camera-body unit sales. More mounts in place -> more proprietary engineering in place -> more propreitary lenses -> more profit. In the meantime a larger installed base gives Sigma the incentive to make a (second) run of a lens in K-mount (after they do the Canon and Nikon runs).

That, anyway, is what I was told.

Yes. Makes sense.

Also, proprietary colours restricts the used market resale value.

Not everyone wants a yellow DSLR.

This might backfire on the brand.

[Kerrowdown]

on board audio recording due to loud focus mechanism(s)

My manual lenses are pretty quiet.