[Leica] Re: LUG Digest, Vol 30, Issue 260

[scott at adrenaline.com (Scott McLoughlin)]

F?lix L?pez de Maturana wrote:

> This scenario makes me wonder
>
> - How can afford Leica the necessary founds for remaining in this kind 
> of race. No doubts about the M and R digital quality -16 bits or not - 
> but it?s necessary for the quick technology development quite a lot of 
> R&D to be competitive.
> - What kind of strong effort has to make Nikon- and other brands- to 
> compete with Canon as otherwise Canon may keep very high their prices.
>
It makes me wonder what's up with Sony R&D on FF sensors?  What kind of 
tech and business progress are other sensor co's making (Kodak, Dalsa?). 

I don't think X camera makers can all design and manufacture their own 
chips. If we look at the PC industry, few companies made their own 
components, and less and less so as time went on.  CPUs, chip sets, 
BIOS, HD's, motherboards and on and on - all provided by horizontal 
industry suppliers.

I think that supporting lots of camera companies delivering high 
quality, competitive products will require a alot of licensing/sourcing 
of the electronic guts of the cameras (and perhaps more - AF? flash 
system?) from horizontal suppliers with really world beating R&D and 
manufaturing (think Intel and AMD, for example).

OTOH, from what I've read over the last year on this list and others, it 
seems like much of the camera world is kind of a do-it-yourself cottage 
industry model, with some selective licensing (like lenses or lens 
designs, etc.).

Is the overall camera industry large enought (sales and profits) to 
support a horizontal + integration industry model?  If not, all roads 
lead to the competitor with the biggest R&D budget, which I guess is Canon.

Scott