Originally posted by Ben_Edict The iPhone is an electronics gadget, the Pentaxes are… cameras. If Pentax released an SDK, they would have to take responsibility for that. The necessary support would kill the company. They would be flooded by support requests and the repair centers would be flooded with dead cameras.
In the past (film days) a Olympus engineer complained to me, that 80% of repairs where completely unnecessary, as just the batteries were dead and needed replacement. People somehow tend to think, technical gadgets just miracleously work. Then they would start installing apps or perceived "functionality upgrades" from the web and finally will wonder, why the camera does not work at all or produces rubbish results. I can very much understand, why no camera manufacturer would take that risk.
Ben
As someone who has been in IT for more than 30 years, I listen to this argument about "open source firmware" or a "software developer kit" and comparisons to the iPhone with a bit of amusement. I must confess that I don't own an iPhone, but as far as I know, the apps that are available for the iPhone don't fundamentally alter the way the telephone or builtin camera work. The apps may USE the telephone or camera, and may enable you to do some really cool stuff, but the basic telephone and camera functions are unchanged.
That is because the iPhone is more of a general-purpose computer than a camera is. Apple built it with enough processing power (cpu and memory) to handle all the telephone functions, AND let developers create new apps.
What people seem to be asking of Pentax is to be able to rewrite the fundamental operating system of the camera and add/subtract/modify existing features that, in the opinion of some, don't measure up. The apps in an iPhone are segregated from the Apple firmware. As such, it is not possible (or at least extremely unlikely) that a third-party app could cause the telephone or camera to fail. I'm quite sure that Apple went to great lengths to insure this. Otherwise, they would be swamped with warranty claims.
Yes, I suppose a camera COULD be designed in a fashion, similar to the iPhone, that allowed third-party apps. Do you want to check your stock portfolio from your camera? Do you want to email a picture directly from your camera, via the builtin wifi adapter? You might be allowed to do that, but I don't think that Pentax, or any other manufacturer is EVER going to allow you to mess around with the autofocus or exposure algorithms. Or retrofit screw-drive AF for a failed SDM lens. Or increase the FPS. Or increase the flash synch speed (if that's even possible w/o a hardware mod).
The iPhone operating system is anything but open. It is no more open than Microsoft's Windows OS is. You can write apps to run under either OS, but very, very, very few people outside of MS ever get to see the actual source code for Windows itself.