taran Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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Tariq Gibran wrote:
In the past, Sony's sensor division was willing to sell to anyone regardless of what Sony was doing with their cameras from a competitive standpoint.
Perhaps I am crazy, but this hasn't been true for years.
Who has access to the 20 or 24 mpix APS-c sensors? Nobody. Nex 7 is out 4 years now. Who has access to Phase detect full frame sensors? Nobody. Almost 2 years old.
Sony sells a 1" consumer part to its competitors like canon, panasonic... well, the new rx100m4 stacked color chip gives them at least a year on the competition again, because they knew it was coming.
The last Sony camera with a Sony chip to have feature parity with a 3rd party image processing system was Sony A900, a camera released in 2008, before Sony really dug in its heels and dropped prices so much they pretty much drove every other sensor maker out of the market. One could argue that the 36mpix chip of D800 was contemporaneous with the Sony A7r, but Sony wouldn't launch that camera for another year, and when they did, the price was drastically lower than D800.
Sony is playing a very shrewd game. The sensors from Ricoh GR, Leica T, Coolpix A, Fuji X, D610/750/810 and even olympus m43 are all so old Sony can make them for peanuts, yet those are current models.
The sensor technology from a6000 and A7s/rii is, imho, many years advanced from all those manufacturers I just mentioned.
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