Modern mounts are the result of trying to do exactly what they do - keep you buying from the same company. The profit is made on the additional items. With the digital revolution, we're now seeing some of what the traditional cam co's are afraid of - new companies coming in and stealing some of their turf. Since the giant electronics companies (Sony, Matsushita, etc.) are the ones who are manufacturing the digital imaging electronics that the traditional body makers need for the new market, they're going to have to live with them entering camera industry as end product makers. This, however, is going to cause them to not just stick to the tendency toward making brand specific mounts, they're going to move toward making all the lines more "system" based in attempt to build some sort of automatic expansion. Gotta make that revenue up somewhere.
If anybody, the traditional electronics companies that are entering the still pic market are going to move toward a universal mount assuming an alliance with the non-body-producing lens makers. That would be aimed at the mid and lower range user - seems to me a company like Sigma would be partial to this. This would, in turn, push the traditional body makers to concentrate further on the higher end, to just putting their name on products that are actually built by the traditional elec co's, or just out of the game altogether.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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Why the hell didn't all of the 35mm SLR camera manufacturers make a standard lens mount way back when?
Imagine not being restricted to a single manufacturer due to one's investment in glass.
Off topic, I know...
They did. M42 universal mount.
Modern mounts are the result of trying to do exactly what they do - keep you buying from the same company. The profit is made on the additional items. With the digital revolution, we're now seeing some of what the traditional cam co's are afraid of - new companies coming in and stealing some of their turf. Since the giant electronics companies (Sony, Matsushita, etc.) are the ones who are manufacturing the digital imaging electronics that the traditional body makers need for the new market, they're going to have to live with them entering camera industry as end product makers. This, however, is going to cause them to not just stick to the tendency toward making brand specific mounts, they're going to move toward making all the lines more "system" based in attempt to build some sort of automatic expansion. Gotta make that revenue up somewhere.
If anybody, the traditional electronics companies that are entering the still pic market are going to move toward a universal mount assuming an alliance with the non-body-producing lens makers. That would be aimed at the mid and lower range user - seems to me a company like Sigma would be partial to this. This would, in turn, push the traditional body makers to concentrate further on the higher end, to just putting their name on products that are actually built by the traditional elec co's, or just out of the game altogether.
Such are the ruminations of my hypothesy.