carstenw
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 p.2 #11 · Digital back for 35mm cameras | |
I can't think of many film cameras which cost $2200, so you are probably not comparing like types of cameras there.
There are all kinds of companies which would be capable of making a sensor back but not a full camera, not to speak of lenses. That is the primary reason, not the business proposal.
Brian, vaguely insulting people doesn't help you. Your claim that we are not thinking outside of the box is just not true. There are all kinds of ways to get something up and running, but while you are busy pretending to think outside the box, you are ignoring all the real problems, even though they have been repeatedly listed here.
The main one is a question of tolerances. The old film bodies and film lenses were made to looser tolerances, partly because 35mm film is relatively low resolution (apart from a few specialty films), partly because film actually has depth, unlike painfully flat sensors, and so light focused at various depths can actually still look sharp, and partly because the whole system, meaning lenses, mounts, and camera bodies, is just not set up accurately enough to yield satisfying results.
In the end only Leica really gave it a proper shot (with Kodak making their own try, based on reworked Nikon and Canon film cameras), and Leica arguably uses the tightest tolerances in the whole industry. For most cameras, especially older nice camera like the Nikon F, Pentax Spotmatic, and so on, the whole chain of equipment would need to go in for an expensive tuneup, to have the photos properly focus in the sensor plane. Lenses would have to be centered, the mount distances tuned, and they would have to be perfectly perpendicular to avoid having only a line in focus, and the rest more or less blurry. The mounts would have to be set on the cameras incredibly accurately, and the film rails would have to be a very exact distance from the mount. The prisms would have to be tuned, as would the focus screens, to allow them to be used properly for focusing.
This is even ignoring the fact that most lenses would not be up to the task. The simple act of focusing the different wavelengths at the same place was sloppier in the film days than required for digital, which is one reason why so many lenses had to be redesigned for digital.
All of this tuning would cost a pretty penny, especially when you consider that the vast majority of these bodies are probably missing the necessary tuning points, and so the castings would have to be modified, shims inserted, and so on, something which would have to be designed and done individually for each type of film body, common sensor module or not. There are not likely more than a half-dozen bodies with sufficient accuracy to even make it feasible, like the late Leicas, Contax cameras, certain high-end Nikons (F6...), and so on.
Then there is the accuracy of the sync signal. This is a real issue in certain medium format cameras, and they do sometimes have to be sent back for tuning, or even non-reversible changes, just to make it work correctly. The whole sync thing is so hard that Hasselblad actually designed backs for their V cameras which are triggered mechanically, just like a film back, and even then, it doesn't work at all sync speeds on all cameras.
And who would do this work? Canon, Nikon, Leica, Contax and so on certainly not! They have other things to do. And the imaginary sensor company couldn't possibly take on all this work.
We haven't even yet talked about how satisfying the end result would be. Setting ISO on the back would have to be matched by setting ISO on the camera. The high shutter speeds would probably be off-limits for tolerance reasons. Auto-bracketing, metering (film camera metering often reflects light off the film and measures it afterwards, which doesn't work with sensors since they reflect light very differently), Auto-ISO, and many, many more functions would be MIA. In the end you would probably have a truncated shutter speed range, aperture, double ISO-setting camera with no other features. This would only be attractive in a Frankenstein kind of way to the vast majority of photographers, especially considering that since the sensor is often one of the most expensive components, you wouldn't even save much money. Oh, and the sensor would probably not be FF due to cost and practical considerations, and the battery required would add to the bulk and weight of the camera, making the whole thing less attractive. Did you see the Kodak/Nikon cameras Bif posted?
I probably missed another dozen concerns, and while some of the issues I listed may not exist in reality, and others may be solvable, every one of them would have to be examined and dealt with.
So while this is all a vaguely interesting Gedankenexperiment, it is not a good basis upon which to insult people when you haven't even done a rudimentary amount of proper thinking about the real problems. Had you put this up as a fun thread, rather than pretending to be doing serious thinking about it, and had you had a good sense of humour about some of the replies, then this could have been fun, but instead it is not.
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I'm not talking about you...