Interesting Article on Fed and Kiev Factories Now

[zhang xk]

Ian

Someone ought to suggest "Corporation FED" to offer their surplus stocks to some digital company in China or India. The FED-5 may be a suitable platform to build a cheap LTM rangefinder on. There's a guy from the photo.net board who
was building his own digital M on a Leica M2 body. Those FED-5 will make plenty of cheap digital RF cameras which will make us FED and Zorki fanatics very happy.
😀

Jay

Jay Tongzhi, Nihao!

My Nikon Cool Pix 2000 has no view finder. A green light on the view screen shows correct focus. If the zoom lens was replaced with a LTM or M mount, it can be used as an interchangeable rangefinder Digital P/S. But the sensor size may be too small for most 35mm rangefinder lenses. The image quality of this Nikon is good enough for some 8" prints. Someone has to find a way to meet the demand for a cheap interchangeable lens digi-rangefiner camera. There are huge number of rangefnder lenses owners. With such a camera, we will have an easier and quicker way to tell the difference between a Summicron 50/2 and a Jupiter 8. 😀

Cheers,

Zhang

 

[VinceC]

Sensor size is a problem when trying to adapt digital P&S sensors for interchangeable lenses. On my Canon G1, the 32mm-102mm equivalent zoom is actually a 7mm to 21mm lens. Most RF users aren't searching for wildly long telephotos, yet we're talking about a format where a 21mm lens -- traditionally our widest -- is equivalent to a 105mm.

It simply isn't practical to use that sensor size for any existing lineup of interchangeable lenses.

 

[Ash]

so is there any way of reversing that 'zoom factor' ?

I tried to take a piece from some old binoculars, can it be done that with the addition of an element or two, the focus is concentrated smaller for these small sensors?

 

[rxmd]

so is there any way of reversing that 'zoom factor' ?

I guess optical quality would be significantly degraded, otherwise camera manufacturers would have been doing this for ages.

Does anybody have a link or a reference for this article with the FED 5 TTL conversion? If it's on paper, the name of the journal would be OK already.

Philipp

 

[ZorkiKat]

so is there any way of reversing that 'zoom factor' ?

I tried to take a piece from some old binoculars, can it be done that with the addition of an element or two, the focus is concentrated smaller for these small sensors?

A bigger sensor size is the only recourse. Something like the one found in the DSLRs which result in a 1,5-1,6X crop factor.

Jay

 

[ZorkiKat]

Jay Tongzhi, Nihao!

My Nikon Cool Pix 2000 has no view finder. A green light on the view screen shows correct focus. If the zoom lens was replaced with a LTM or M mount, it can be used as an interchangeable rangefinder Digital P/S. But the sensor size may be too small for most 35mm rangefinder lenses. The image quality of this Nikon is good enough for some 8" prints. Someone has to find a way to meet the demand for a cheap interchangeable lens digi-rangefiner camera. There are huge number of rangefnder lenses owners. With such a camera, we will have an easier and quicker way to tell the difference between a Summicron 50/2 and a Jupiter 8. 😀

Cheers,

Zhang

Nihao Zhang tongzhi

I really believe that we should look to the east (China!) where practically everything is now made 😀

FED could follow this model: The first DSLRs were really modified film SLR cameras. Fuji did it with their S-series DSLRs. They took existing Nikon film SLR bodies (F-60 for the S1 and F-80 for the S2 and S3) and built a digital back around it. The resulting digiFED-5 may end, big and ugly as it already is, even bigger and uglier, extending at the back and the bottom. Kodak also took the same approach when they made their DSLRs- often using a body from Nikon, or sometimes Canon. Epson did this too- the RD-1 still retains the original Voigtlaender form.

The current DSLRs are often smaller because they are really digital cameras which retained only the reflex system and lens mount of the earlier film SLRs.

Jay

 

[zhang xk]

Nihao Zhang tongzhi

I really believe that we should look to the east (China!) where practically everything is now made 😀

FED could follow this model: Fuji did it with their S-series DSLRs. They took existing Nikon film SLR bodies (F-60 for the S1 and F-80 for the S2 and S3) and built a digital back around it. The resulting digiFED-5 may end, big and ugly as it already is, even bigger and uglier, extending at the back and the bottom. Kodak also took the same approach when they made their DSLRs- often using a body from Nikon, or sometimes Canon.

Jay

Hi Jay,

Another way of using existing rangefinder lenses is to extend their back focus distance by adding a lens element so that they can be used on some DLSRs. An Olympus E300 may be a good candidate as the back focus distance is shorter. A modified E300 without the mirror box, and a correct back focusing distance is an ideal Digi-rangefider. They have a correct size and a much bigger sensor size.

Cheers,

Zhang

 

[phototone]

I could be wrong, but I believe that current APS size sensors require a vertical running shutter, not a horizontal shutter such as Fed has.

 

[rxmd]

I believe that current APS size sensors require a vertical running shutter, not a horizontal shutter such as Fed has.

Why?

Philipp

 

[Malcolm_J]

I think the main problem is the FSU manufacturers have an inferiority complex about the apparent fanciness of Japanese cameras. I do not find the FED2 to be more complicated to use than a Japanese SLR. If anything it is easier, since you soon learn to guess exposures and you quickly learn what works and what does not work by studying your own pictures. Actually, having a simple camera encourages you to do this.

All that has been said before, just as it is evident that quaint, clunky cameras with a pre-war style and zero brand image in the Western world have no chance in our markets, which are dominated by advertising signals, by what is trendy and neat and makes you look slick and smart. If FED produced a digital that was otherwise the same as the traditional camera, I'd look at buying it. But very few others would, I suspect. One of the main reasons I don't have a digital (apart from being a cheapskate) is that I don't like the "feature overload" of DSLRs. Why can't they keep it simple? Japanese marketing practice - drown the consumer with fancies that create the illusion of progress. Yet there has been no progress where it counts. Very few DSLRs will take a noticeably better picture than a well-adjusted FSU rangefinder with a good lense.

At the very least, FED/Kiev etc could have made an effort in the early 1990s to exploit their cheapness, brilliant lenses and old-fashioned, timeless looks. They did not because a bureaucracy can never become an enterprise. This is a matter of the people who advance in a bureaucracy, who of course are quite different from the people who advance in a competitive enterprise. I have seen this with my own eyes, having worked in both types of organisation. I have even seen a bureaucracy attempt to change itself nto an enterprise - and fail hopelessly. The British privatisations of former monopoly utilities provide ample lessons in what happens when you fiddle with big organisations that don't want to change.

It boils down to an opportunity missed - and now the window is shut. They can't catch up and get into digital now. If they want to salvage anything at all, they ought to get on the net and push the rangefinder cult, offer products, services, high quality film development and so forth. It's a niche market, but niche markets can be profitable.