Originally posted by asw66 I expect that the K7's built-in compensation for DA (etc) lenses will prove to be a powerful factor in lens purchases over the coming months and years. Anyone with a K7 who is considering a Pentax lens versus a 3rd party equivalent will thus have an excellent reason to prefer the Pentax lens.
Perhaps this will become a significant part of Pentax's business model: make relatively small profits on camera bodies, but make the real money on Pentax lenses. If so, Sigma and Tamron will have their work cut out for themselves.
I believe that there are a few other DSLRs out there from other manufacturers that already do this - this is not unique to Pentax.
Originally posted by Ratmagiclady Tech-prognosticators, I heard recently, are predicting the demise of the powerful home computer as we know it before too long, everything mostly becoming remote and with smaller, more portable/dedicated devices meaning the mass market for powerful computers that most just use to surf the Web and play games might be going away. (Though I think the U.S. will be needing infrastructure for that to happen.)
If you can have a camera that can directly output the corrections people who put something together on the lab bench might like, that cuts down on behind-the-computer time, and there's nothing, I think, really stopping a third party lensmaker from encoding the same kind of info into their lenses if they so choose. As long as the information exists, this seems very doable.
Two things...
1) The advent of the "thin client PC" and the death of the fat desktop PC has been being trumpeted for, oh, 10-15 years (probably much more)... however, even in areas where it is a natural fit, thin clients haven't found a foothold and regular full PCs are still the standard choice.
2) The lens correction database is stored on the camera itself, I believe, not the lens, so there's nothing the third-party manufacturers could do about it. (Unless Pentax open-sources their firmware or allows "plug-ins" to the firmware to add third-party lens info, neither is which is remotely likely!)