Originally posted by Mistral75 Just the R&D and marketing departments of different manufacturers working on similar products, dans l'air du temps.
Sony was/is ahead of Ricoh/Pentax on this one.
Ahead in the sense they have an FF MILC which, if that wasn't enough, is at a nice budget price point. Clearly. Won hands down.
On a strict marketing point though it is messy: they offer an "a- camera" which isn't compatible with A mount and needs an adapter to do so, and bulky one (although it offers AF but really, is it worth it?) and E mount lenses can be used but only in a crop mode (of there's any) and NEX brand is dead so they use the A- brand but lenses of A mount don't work directly.
Yeah, nicely done. Typical Sony
How to botch a good (or at least nice) product with crappy everything else.