test results SONY 70-400 with A700

[PhotoTraveler]

Patents have various renewal periods and phases. The farthest you get take one out, in the US is 20 years. And they have closed loopholes that let folks stretch them out, mainly involving the application process where you could draw that out.

Still, you have to pay for the 1 or 2 extensions during that 20 year period. I think the first period is 7 years, so if you don't pay for the extension, your patent expires.

At any rate, it doesn't matter, people make way to big of a deal of patents. They are more of a thing joe public thinks about, not companies. For starters, companies patent stuff all the time and have no issue licensing it, that's the main use of patents. If a company want to use something that is patented by someone else and there is no way around it, they will accept the minimal fee they have to pay to use it. Could be a royality, could be a one time fee, in the end, it's tiny. Companies deal with it every day. Where that part of things goes bad is when news and such latches on to a very normal agreement between companies and make a big deal of it, like somehow the company is buying how to do something from another. In reality it's usualy just legal stuff, "our thing is like yours, even though we designed it, we don't want you to sue us", and there may be dozens of such deals back and forth between the 2 companies all ready. Still from time to time you see news make a big deal out of such a deal for no reason.

Additionally patents tend to be easy to get around. It's hard to get a really strong patent. You can't just submit something to the patent offices on a sketch saying "move sensor for stabilization in body" and have a patent on all in-body systems. People will try that, but it won't get accepted. Patents that make it are typically small little things. Which usually means there is many other ways to do it. Right now, we have Minolta, KM, Sony, Pentax, Samsung, Olympus, Nikon (P&S) off the top of my head who have done it, probably others I have missed. While some of those you may say are the same, there was certainly legal maneuvers to get it from one name to the other.

If Canon and Nikon want's in body stabilization, they can have it now. Either in house design, or just call Sony and license it from them. Sony probably has the rights on designs to the newest Gen AS racks. But Minolta probably holds the patents they license back to. Canon or Nikon could work with either to have it. Sony Corp would certainly love to ship sensors to KM with the AS system attached, that's more money. Companies license stuff left and right between each other. They have no reason not to, as it makes them money, and if they refuse such things, the day will come when the company refusing wants to use something someone else has, then they have done themselves in. Look at Ring motors, Canon did development on them, and I think Sigma was the other one who did development on them. Everyone else is almost certainly licensing them. You don't go and re-invent something done by 2 others all ready.

Also, there may not be as many patents as people think, often there are no patents. This is something people confuse with camera mounts all the time. There is no patents blocking 3rd parties and such on camera mounts. It's all stone age stuff (1950s). And much of it no one probably ever was able to get a patent on, and stuff like ROM protocols are not patented, that would be a dumb move by a camera maker, they keep it as internal IP, so no one every has right too it. From the day EOS mount hit the street nothing stopped anyone from making a lens for it, no patent issues, just the issue of figuring out how it works. With no patents, no one has access to that info or ever will. So everything will be a hack until the end of time.

Getting a bit back to what I said in earlier threads. Camera makers can't hold back what they can't make. Going from 486 to Pentium 4 wasn't possible, they had to work there way there. But little steps along the way they probably could have skipped. The main thing is you trickle out out feature slowly over time. Not put all of them in one thing at once. DSLRs are doing this, each one brings a couple little things they could have done long ago. Often cost is part of it. Other times it's they know you will by a new body on the next round. Car makers have always done this. Bring out a new model, people buy. Next year, bring out the convertible, keeps sales going that year, and maybe some early buys sell the hard top and buy the convertible, then come out with the new engine (never put the new engine in the new car the same time, always bring it out in the second year, or the last year of the old model), year after that, bring the All wheel drive. So on and so forth. They could do it all in one shot. But that would use all that have one one shot, and have nothing to sell for the next 3-4 years.

2.8/24-70 FF VR/IS lenses may be possible. But even if Nikon and Canon has designs, they are in no rush if they think they can sell another round of non-VR ones. But if your competition suddenly makes a move, then you go. Canon probably had the IS kit lenses designed for a while, but waited until the competition began to make a dent. Similarly, Canon didn't need to update their 24TS lens for a long time, no competition, then Nikon hit with a better one. Now the long rumored update to the Canon 24TS looks to be happening (canon USA has removed the 24TS from the website). They could have been sitting on the lens for a long time. They even admitted to doing this with the 5D, they flat out said they have no reason to update till competition comes. They probably worked through a living design for a while till Sony showed their hand way to early and made it clear to Canon a threat was coming. Canon then went into "get it to production".

[Dusty]

I think the EVIL is too different from the DSLR to make people dedicated to DSLRs switch. And P&Sers don't want to, either. They want the single lens, 5mm to 5 zillion mm lens, they're not that concerned with lens quality. After all, a few years ago they were shooting everything on trow-away cameras with plastic lenses.

EVIL can only triumph when good men do nothing, wait, wrong evil........ When they've got a real-time, accurate display that they can project into a viewfinder or as a 'heads up" display. I find it cumbersome to use LV on my 350 if it's not to shoot at low or high angles. Same goes for my wife's P&S, I usually use the viewfinder.

I've shot on ground glass large format backs, wire-framed "sports viewfinders", waist level and eye level viewfinders. The eye level viewfinder is the most useful. You turn your head to follow the shot, the camera - and it's view - are right there with you. Waist level viewfinders work good in weddings, and other static work, but become a problem if shooting anything not level and on the same plane as you are. Try using one to get a top down view of a flower. You usually end up holding the camera upside down in front of you.

A viewfinder on the camera back is it's own type of problem. One problem never mentioned is steadiness. Holding a camera to your eye sets up an isometric tension that helps stabilize the camera. You also have the stray light/bright light problem. Project a good live view into a viewfinder, and you overcome those problems. While the optical viewfinder my eventually be replaced, I think for pros and advanced shooters they'll always have an eye level viewfinder.

Dusty

[Greg Beetham]

Hmm looks like I'm not going to live that one down in a hurry, the 486 to P4 in one jump thingy (t'was just a slight embellishment), well ok, maybe they could have done it in about a half or even a third of the amount of CPU models than they actually did...if they wanted.
Greg

Haw! Dusty, I got in first with my "it's a necessary evil" but no one noticed I think, but your "EVIL can only triumph when good men do nothing" isn't bad either.

[KevinBarrett]

But the love of money is the root of all EVIL. Companies will make EVIL cameras when the market demands them, which will be when they offer multiple clear advantages over the alternatives.

[bfitzgerald]

So the new lens is good then???

Evil, I would rather shoot with this..than buy an Evil camera!

http://www.ozcamera.com/hanimex110.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I am pretty certain I have a 110L up in the loft somewhere..probably near mint.
When I got my ist "real" 35mm camera, believe me, it was like driving a Rolls Royce.

Way too much tech focus for me nowadays, let's keep it simple..OVF is that..nice, clear, and simple

[bakubo]

If Canon and Nikon want's in body stabilization, they can have it now.

A couple of years ago on another forum I said that Canon and Nikon probably already have in-body stabilization in prototype form. I am pretty sure that they have it, but until they think the financial advantages outweigh the disadvantages they won't release it. Most companies that are any good will prepare and develop all kinds of technology and some of it may never get released.

[jcoffin]

[ ... ]

At any rate, it doesn't matter, people make way to big of a deal of patents. They are more of a thing joe public thinks about, not companies. For starters, companies patent stuff all the time and have no issue licensing it, that's the main use of patents. If a company want to use something that is patented by someone else and there is no way around it, they will accept the minimal fee they have to pay to use it. Could be a royality, could be a one time fee, in the end, it's tiny.

Not always exactly tiny, and many companies put up a serious fight to keep from having to pay them. At it happens I was involved in finding the prior art Hewlett Packard used to fight back when Intergraph sued them for patent infringement. HP was ecstatic to pay only 141 million dollars -- Intel (who didn't hire us) had recently paid $675 million. When TI was sued by Intergraph, they came to us even earlier in the proceedings, and ended paying only $18 million. No, $675 million wasn't enough to put Intel out of business or anything like that, but even for a company the size of Intel, it's not even close to tiny -- not by any stretch of the imagination.

Yes, patent licensing is a fact of life for a lot of companies -- but it is a big deal. If anything, you have it exactly backwards: most of the public simply has no clue of how much this affects business, and the businesses involved think about it drastically more than most of the general public realizes.

Companies deal with it every day. Where that part of things goes bad is when news and such latches on to a very normal agreement between companies and make a big deal of it, like somehow the company is buying how to do something from another. In reality it's usualy just legal stuff, "our thing is like yours, even though we designed it, we don't want you to sue us", and there may be dozens of such deals back and forth between the 2 companies all ready. Still from time to time you see news make a big deal out of such a deal for no reason.

I'd certainly agree that most patent infringement is unwitting rather than a result of intentional copying or anything like that. Nonetheless, it's quite a bit more than just "our thing is like yours...we don't want you to sue us." A fair number of companies (obviously Intergraph, but also TI, IBM and HP, among many others) have aggressive patent licensing campaigns where they clearly look for people who are infringing their patents, and either negotiate settlements or take them to court. The amounts of money involved are quite large as well -- IBM currently makes around 2 billion dollars a year off of patent licenses. I don't know their exact numbers, but I'm quite certain that TI's patent licensing revenues are well over a billion dollars as well.

Additionally patents tend to be easy to get around. It's hard to get a really strong patent. You can't just submit something to the patent offices on a sketch saying "move sensor for stabilization in body" and have a patent on all in-body systems. People will try that, but it won't get accepted. Patents that make it are typically small little things. Which usually means there is many other ways to do it. Right now, we have Minolta, KM, Sony, Pentax, Samsung, Olympus, Nikon (P&S) off the top of my head who have done it, probably others I have missed. While some of those you may say are the same, there was certainly legal maneuvers to get it from one name to the other.

You can come pretty close in some cases. Minolta has some pretty fundamental patents on in-body stabilization. For example, take a look at US Patent 5,832,214. I don't think it would be trivial to work around this one:

1. A camera comprising:

a taking lens for projecting an object image on a photosensitive member;

a first detecting means for detecting a focus condition from said object image projected by said taking lens;

a focus adjusting means for adjusting a focus of said taking lens based on said focus condition detected by said first detecting means;

a second detecting means for detecting a shake amount of said object image caused by camera-shake;

a correcting means for correcting a shake of said object image based on said shake amount detected by said second detecting means; and

a control means for prohibiting an operation of said focus adjusting means when said detected shake amount is larger than a predetermined value.

One caveat: this may not be quite as general as it initially appears. The "means for" language would almost certainly lead to a court consider these "means plus function" limitations, which means they don't really cover every possible means for carrying out the described function -- rather, they cover only the means disclosed in the patent specification, or reasonable equivalents thereof. Nonetheless, this is quite general. It's also old enough (the apparent priority date is 1990) that finding prior art to invalidate it would probably be quite difficult.

If Canon and Nikon want's in body stabilization, they can have it now. Either in house design, or just call Sony and license it from them.

An in-house design would not give them any immunity from Minolta's patents. I doubt they could license them from Sony either -- my immediate guess is that Minolta licensed them to Sony (probably pretty cheaply) but anybody else who wants to license them has to go back to Minolta, not Sony. Of course it's possible Minolta transferred the patents to Sony in their entirety, but I can't quite imagine why they would. Nonetheless, it's true that Canon and/or Nikon could have in-body stabilization if they wanted it badly enough. This is especially true because Japanese companies only rarely sue each other over patent infringement, even when it's clearly taking place. If (for example) a Korean company were to infringe the patents, a law suit would be much more likely.

[ ...]

Also, there may not be as many patents as people think, often there are no patents.

There are patents. I've quoted one above -- and just glancing through things, it looks to me like Minolta probably has at least a couple dozen others or so related to correcting camera shake. From my experience in the area, a half dozen good patents is plenty to form the basis of a lawsuit.

I18n note: when I use "billion" above, I'm using it as it's used in the US. IIRC, this is what most English speakers would call a "Milliard".

[PhotoTraveler]

They key is most those cases are accidental infringements or depending on a point of view are companies after the fact going after a company, or a company having a business model that is too sue (Rambus). I put that one a whole different path from what I was talking about. If a company knows someone has a patent, they will in general work the problem, and I don't think very often when a company approaches another about licensing they get blown off.

It's very hard to know if you are infringing on someone's patent, as no one will every know every patent out there, and further even if you did, a lot of time whether you infringed is only made clear after a judge makes it clear.

Minolta verses Honeywell has various classic things happen. One company uses another stuff, all is good. That company decides to develop replacement in house, things go bad. Company gets sued. Company gets really bad legal advise (told to fight, where all other camera makers were smart and just paid up front), so the problem grew, Minolta lost hard. And in the end, Minolta may have been in the right, but just lost.

I don't think many companies violate someone's patent knowingly. Unless you are a defense contractor where you can leverage anyones stuff no matter a patent if it's going to military hardware (and you have the proper Government clauses in place).