Konica Minolta withdraw from camera business

Konica Minolta withdraw from camera business:

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0601/06011901konicaminoltaout.asp

 

"David J Taylor"

So the next DSLR to fit my system will be a Sony huh! Hmmmmm, I hear Nikon
and Canon are nice. I never thought I'd see the end of it. They should
still badge it as a KM! Heck, Minolta still should have stuck with the same
name too. Damn corporations! wwwwaaaahhhh!!!!!!

 

Wow. My condolances to Alan Browne...

Both the 5D and 7Ds were good DSLRs; clearly KM couldn't market them in
North America to save their lives.

Maybe the Sony acquisition of the intellectual property is a good
thing...Sony has more leverage market place wise, although for the last
4-5 years they've really lost their innovative touch.

 

<SNIP>

Tiny correction:
"Both the the 5D and 7Ds _ARE_ good DSLRs..."

Cheers,
ink

 

Valid point.

In fact, if you're satisfied with the lenses and gear available today,
someone could probably build a really good kit in the coming months
while KM equipment goes on firesale.

Long term though, you'll be the Amiga enthusiast in a world of
Microsoft and Apple. If you like Amigas, then you're set.

 

I'm not surprised to see this happen. The 5D and 7D were good
products, but consumers flocked to Canon and to a lesser degree Nikon
DSLRs.

I think ultimately this is a great move for consumers. Sony is a
serious player in the digicam market, and some of their higher-end
products have pushed very close to the DSLR market, and the acquisition
of K-M's assets give it the technology and SLR credibility it was
missing.

A real Sony DSLR would be the first truly formidable competitor to
Canon and Nikon.

 

No surprise there. I predicted this several months ago, based on
detailed information I received from contacts in Japan. It is merely
bowing to the inevitable.

The future of what remains of the Konica Minolta DSLR line lies with
Sony in Japan, so may the Good Lord help Minolta owners.

I discussed this with my friendly appointed Konica Minolta dealer this
morning. He was very sanguine about it.

For many months now, he has been trying to sell the same Konica
Minolta Dynax (Maxxum) 7D body he bought when it was first announced.
It is still in his shop window, with a price ticket 60% less than the
original price, and even with an 18-70mm Konica Minolta lens, a Konica
Minolta battery grip and a Konica Minolta dedicated flash gun thrown
in for free, there has not been one single person who expressed any
genuine interest in buying it.

He has sold three 5D bodies, but had to discount all of them below the
price he paid for them.

Sony will need a lot of luck to make any kind of success out of the
K-M DSLRs. As I have said before, Sony is no stronger than Konica
Minolta, and the chances of real success must be very slim indeed.

 

The 5D and 7D were thoroughly mediocre products. The image quality
was inferior to other camera brands using the same 6.1 MP Sony CCD.
The anti-shake system was vastly inferior to Canon's IS and Nikon's
VR. The cameras were expensive for what they were.

It is a good idea to have anti-shake in camera, but not if it
struggles to perform to the extent that the Konica Minolta system
does.

The latest Nikon VR is worth 4 stops in shutter speed. Canon's VR is
worth 3 stops. Konica Minolta's anti-shake struggles to do much
better than 1 stop, and certainly cannot achieve 2. Yet it adds so
much cost to the camera bodies that Konica Minolta was rumoured to be
selling every 5D and 7D body at a loss. The result? Minolta owners
deserted Konica Minolta in droves and bought other brands instead.

There will be some bargains in Konica Minolta 5D and 7D bodies over
the next few months. At last, they will be selling for what they are
really worth.

 

"David J Taylor"

I thought it was only Rich that assumed that nobody else read the obvious
forums?

 

Statistically, it's nearly a pure Microsoft world with Apple a tiny satellite
going around in circles. Apple has its virtues, but market-share and low
price are hardly among them.

In the DSLR world, perhaps Pentax's market share is similar to that of Apple
in the PC world, but at least Pentax gives fantastic value at a low price.

 

Some of us don't spend all day in DP Review, Helen. I tend to be
triggered by postings here that there is something worth looking at on DP
Review, and others may have missed the cross-posted message.

I don't know whether to feel sorry or not for K-M users. If they are
lucky, their DSLR line may well continue, albeit with a different brand
name. I do hope the in-camera image stabilisation technology stays -
unique selling point if ever there was one.

David

 

Don't. They had plenty of opportunities to get out of K-M over the
last few months. It has been obvious since the merger of Konica and
Minolta that two weak companies combined to make an even weaker one do
not have a bright future ahead.

At the time f the DSLR collaboration with Sony was announced, it was
abundantly clear to any intelligent person that this was an act of
complete desperation. This was pointed out at the time by me and
others on here. Anyone who couldn't see that the writing was on the
wall for Konica Minolta's photo division must have been wilfully
blind.

If you read the press releases, Konica Minolta has made it clear that
the DSLR line has been transferred to Sony. Note that Sony will also
be responsible for all service and repair of Konica Minolta equipment,
past, present and future. Konica Minolta have cut and run and
basically washed their hands of everything.

Nice idea, but ineffectual. It struggled to achieve two stops'
improvement. When all Canon's IS lenses comfortably manage 3 stops,
and Nikon's latest VR manages 4 stops, a system that couldn't even
produce 2 stops consistently was never going to be a selling point,
except to Minolta owners who were too "loyal" to consider any other
brand - and they were just fools.

 

Do you have ANYTHING to back ANY of that up? Everything I have read
contradicts EVERYTHING you have said here. I take that back, they are
6.1 MP Sony CCD chips.

My KM AS camera will handle 2 stops improvement all the time and 3
stops most of the time.

Clyde

 

I can see avoiding going into K-M due to the rumors; but why should
people have gotten *out*? Would they have benefited in some way? As
it is, they can potentially take advantage of fire-sale prices from
the company to expand their equipment collection.

True. Sony having gotten themselves on so many people's blacklists by
now, for various forms of bad behavior (for me it's memory sticks and
malware on music CDs).

 

That does make me wonder a lot...

Newsgroups are a dangerous place to get the truth about anything.
Evangelical advocates tend to flood these forums and everyone thinks
his tool is the best. The small minority are there to bash. There isn't
much reasonable middle ground.

It makes me wonder about why KM failed. Was it really the marketing?
Could it have been the product? This group is a bad place to find out.
The average person here is a camera techie. We think of ourselves as
above average photographers and may actually be.

It seems that the view today is that a lot of people are decrying the
possible death of a technical photographer's camera as it moves from KM
to Sony. I wonder how big of a market we really are?

The digital Rebel XT (or whatever) sells a lot more than the KM 5D. Is
that just due to marketing or has that cleaner design and
hide-most-of-the-goodies-in-menu philosphy one that actually sells
better?

The example above just may mean that all the technical camera buffs who
like the KM dSLR camera may buy from the Web. The only people going
into that camera store (and others) may be the average amateur who
doesn't know what he wants.

Well, we are probably going to find out. Sony does know how to market.
They may or may not chuck a lot of things that are dear to us techies.
I think they will try to market what KM has already. Hey, they are
going to be using KM's design and manufacturing teams - at first.

Just remember, that Sony isn't not in business to make cameras; they
are in business to make MONEY. If they can make money with KM products,
they will. If not, they will change course. They had better. Maybe this
is a lesson that KM did not get right.

Well, I don't know the market very well at all. It will be interesting
to watch. I love my KM camera and will keep using it. If it dies and
can't be fixed, I will buy the best available camera for me and keep
taking pictures. There will always be something I can take good
pictures with.

Clyde

 

Gee, news to me....mine works fine even on a 400mm lens handheld at 1/125 @
f6.7
Saved myself OODLES of cash to boot.

 

I have the 7D and did a few tests - 2 stops in any case, 3 stops
most of the time. Quite possibly Canon and Nikon can do more
(the system can be tuned for the particular lens), surely they
have nice features such as panning mode - but also for much more
money that _I_ am willing to pay (YMMV). I simply can't justify
paying EUR 1000 more for a 70-200 f2.8 to get one stop more of IS.

I see another problem with the moving sensor - the image circle
needs to cover not only the sensor area, but the whole area where
the sensor can move. That probably means that there will never
be a full-frame DSLR using this technology.

I don't like Sony behaviour either, but my carry-around P&S is
a Sony DSC-W1 and it is a fine piece of hardware, doing the
job for what I bought it just fine.

My hope is that the Sony will want to enter the DSLR market,
actually they have announced it. Then the logical choice is to
use the K-M mount and get all folks owning K-M lenses
and considering a DSLR as potential customers. For a serious
amateur / prosumer not needing the absolute top the AS in body
can well be a unique selling point.

 

There are two selling points. One is about economy. If you want some
image stabilisation generally without having to pay a fortune for it,
AS is a good choice - at least if it woeks as well with long teles as
for more modest focal lengths. (I have never seen a test of the AS
system with a focal length of more than 400mm.)

But the other is about extending low-light capabilities. There is no
image-stabilised SLR lens in the normal zoom range from anybody which
is faster than f3.5.
(There is _one_ image-stabilised lens with f.2.8, but it is not a
normal zoom, and it costs like £1 K.) Compare this to a f1.4 normal,
and you lose out the better part of the image stabilisation just from
the lens being two and a half stops slower.

Now, if you stick an f1.4 lens, which can be had for not all that much
money if it is a 50mm lens, or even an f1.7 lens, which costs four
times nothing, as the French say, if it's 50mm, onto a dSLR body whith
AS, you get considerably lower available-light capacities for the AS
system than you will ever get for any existing system based on
IS/VR/OS/OIS. For example, for someone who wants to take photograhs of
pastels or watercolours in a museum which hangs them under preservative
lighting, and doesn't allow tripods, a Dynax 7D or 5D is the obviuos
camera of choice. No other camera/lens system will come close. At f1.4,
1/15 and ISO 800, you can expose properly at EV 2, if i did my maths
correctly. Jack the sensitivity up to ISO 3200, and you can expose for
EV 0.

That's a level of available light that's simply not accessible for any
other camera system handheld.

Maybe Canon or Nikon will stick IS/VR into some of their fast primes in
the future. Maybe they never will, for technical or commercial reasons.
But anyway nothing in this line is available now. For reasonably still
subjects in available light, a Dynax 7D or 5D with a fast prime
currently s the best system available.

Jan Böhme

 

@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

I have a Bigma 50~500 for my 7D, I haven't done any scientifical testing but
my results after a year of using it for my favorite subject (aviation
photography) is that I get a better percentage of sharp shots at an
effective focal length of 750mm with the 7D and AS than I used to with my
9xi's and a Sigma 400mm w/o any IS. And this with a bad back that affects
my stability a fair bit...

I ~would~ like a panning mode like some of the other folks' IS lenses,
though.

Bob ^,,^

 

Bullshit. You have no such sources.