Gary writes:
<< I'm left with an appreciation of how Olympus tweaked lens performance
over time, as opposed to today's profit driven product evolution from
Minolta, Canon, Nikon and Pentax, which strives to cheapen production
costs by eliminating exotic/expensive optical designs and compromising
on build materials and the tolerances they can attain
>>
A friend at work used to work for a large American optical manufacturer.
He said that over the years, to cut manufacturing costs, their manufacturing
started to remove lens coatings or go to single coatings from multicoatings
for some surfaces. Any single surface did not make an appreciable difference
in performance but incrementally after a few years the "only slight"
performance hits eventually added up to substantial degradation in
performance. Unfortunately this is very common in manufacturing driven
operations where they are looking to shave a few cents off here or there and
eventually "no body is responsible" for the resultant mess.
There is another infamous Amercian consumer electronics manufacturer
where the president, a Mr Muntz, challenged the enginners to reduce cost by
telling the technicians to remove parts (short them out) to see if the parts
really mattered. If the TV set continued working in some fashion then the
part was considered unnecessary and a suitable cost saving could be realised.
If the set stopped working it was considered necessary and left in the
circuit. These notorious practices have become derisively known amongst
electronics engineers as "Muntzing" where some extreme unscientific shortcut
is used to cut costs.
ON Register distance Markerink's excellent photo site is one of the best
references :
http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/mounts.htm
OM = 46.00mm
Regards,
Tim Hughes
>>Hi100@xxxxxxx<<
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