Jaguar at Work

Micro Four Thirds to be the Standard for Mirrorless (Live View) Lense Mount

Recent rumors state that Fuji and Kodak will join the Micro Four Thirds march. This is quite interesting since the original Four Thirds system was an open standard, but the only companies that showed real appreciation were the two leaders, Olympus and Panasnonic. The Micro Four Thirds is on the other hand, a closed standard but it seems several companies are knocking on the door. Being rational, the mirrorless (live view) system is very attractive, but is also new that supplying lenses for different purposes is a problem in hand. This problem could be overcome with less effort in haste if more companies share the lense mount and that must be the main reason that minor(?) consumer camera brands (such as Fuji and Kodak) want to cooperate with the Micro Four Thirds system. This rational side of view against the situation is what most people can see. Now, let's have a look on the silly side.

So the silly answer that I came up with is that the name Micro Four Thirds is the magic for popularity. The abbreviation for Micro Four Thirds is "M4/3" and what is the big deal about "M4/3"? Well, its got "M" inside the name and all lense mounts with the letter "M" were popular. Let's start off with the M39 and M42 lense mounts. The old M39, also known as the "Leica Thread Mount" or "L Mount" was so popular that most of the old RF lenses we see today are for the M39 mount. For the SLRs, we have the M42 mount, originally by the East Germen Contax, but more known as the "Pentax Thread Mount". Made by Contax, popularized by Pentax and other East European companies, type in M42 in Ebay and you'll be flooded with results. Both the M39 and M42 mount did fade out as the bayonet mounts started to show up, but both thread mounts were wide used as the standard of RF and SLR systems.

The bayonet lense mount age also became the golden age for the SLR system. Almost all SLR camera brands had their own mount, but none of them (as far as I know of) used the world "M" for their lense mount and surely no one mount dominated the market. [Canon: Fd and EF] [Kyocera's Contax and Yashica: C/Y or Y/C] [Leica: R] [Minolta: SR and Alpha] [Nikon: F] [Olympus: OM] [Pentax: K] There should be a few that I missed out, but anyway, I don't believe any of them started with the word "M" in their lense mount names. In the case of RF, however, Leica seemed to be the only manufacturer that survived from the SLR rush with their M mount. This M mount became the standard for the RF system and companies like Minolta and Rollei also introduced lenses and cameras for the Leica M mount. (Let's skip the story of Leica and Minolta's collaboration for now, please. Remember, I'm only trying to be silly here.) Later in the years, companies like Cosina (VM for the Voigtlander brand and ZM for the Zeiss Ikon brand) and Konica (KM) came up with their own "M" mounts, which are 99.9% compatible with the Leica M mount, proving(?) that the M mount is the standard of RF lense mount.

Great work for Olympus and Panasonic for calling naming their mirrorless system, the Micro Four Thirds system, instead of Hybrid Four Thirds or Live View Four Thirds or New Four Thirds or Four Thirds 2 or...

Olympus Korea's Strategy of Making PENIAs

October 10th, 2009, saturday. I had set up four alarms before going to sleep in ten minute intervals, with the first arlarm at 0520 and the time I woke up was 0610. Lucky for me that the last alarm kept ringing for (at least) ten minutes. The reason I had to woke up such early(?) on a saturday was because another limited sales of Olympus E-P1 is scheduled to start at 1000.

Ever since the former minister of treasury's devaluation of Korean won, price of imports have soared. This has greatly increased the burden for the middle class people in enjoying their hobbies (since Korea depends heavily on imports for prosumer level products.) The E-P1 (a Micro Fourthirds digital camera) was announced at such a period and Olympus Korea has made a big decision to keep the price level of this product to the level before the Korean won's big drop.

This had to be a brave and welcoming decision by Olympus Korea for the consumers, or is it? Has Olympus Korea picked to walk the path of "share and honor" instead of "corporate prosperity"? The low(er) price of E-P1 (compared to other countries) just has to mean cuts in cost. I'm not an Olympus insider so I can only guess how they do it and my guess is "keeping stock price to minimal."

The E-P1 itself is a very attractive product and the price is not bad at all. Many people want it. This means a great demand and many stores would love to have plenty ready to sell. Olympus Korea just needs to keep shipping all their stocks to the stores and they would be (nearly) warehouse-fee free. Additionally, when Olympus makes supply agreement with the retailers, I'm pretty sure that there is a mandatory supply of other, less selling, Olympus products also which would lower even more of the Olympus Korea's stock expenses.

Its obvious that this will increase the burden of stock for the retailers and also there exists the risk of over supply, which are not Olympus Korea's favor. Also, Olympus has to keep the flame of "Pen" alive until the economy revives. One good(?) strategy for this is the well known "you can't have it" strategy. To accomplish all of these is my interpretation on why Olympus Korea sells the E-P1 in very limited numbers only.

I personally like the Panasonic series of Micro Fourthirds than the Olympus' and is already am a DMC-GH1 owner. That is why I passed on the early chances of buying an E-P1 when they were given to me, but it is always that when you really need it, the chances aren't always on your side.

Anyway, I got the need to buy an E-P1 now (despite the fact of knowing a new model of Pen to be announced by the end of October, which will be improved in every aspect) so I've been contacting stores here and there in search of a stock. All of the stores that had E-P1 said it was sold out, at most in two days. No store took pre-orders and sold only offline, first come first serve. A few online shops do exist and also have stocks, but they sell at ridiculously high prices.

Last week, a bird chirped to me that a new Pen special store will be opening near the Namdaemun import market some time this week. Early this week, I've confirmed this information with more details that it would be today at ten o'clock, that the opening will be held with thirty Pens availiable for sale.

I arrived at the store at seven and found that I was the first to come. The store was well shut and there was no clean place for me to sit on, so I thought I would patrol around and check the store every few minutes, that I could react with haste in case a line forms.

I live near Gangnam, one of the downtowns of Seoul and it is really dirty in the weekend mornings, before the cleaners show up. Now a saturday morning of Namdaemun, or rather Bukchang-dong (a more of middle-age men's downtown) makes Gangnam (mostly, crowded with early twenties to thirties of both sexes) feel like a clean place. Food trash, remnants of puke and marks of street pissing is extremely gross in both visual and olfactory sense.

After about twenty minutes my nose got knocked-out which made me bear the waiting a lot better. I also got tired, so bought a newspaper and sat over it on a near by stairs. About an hour later, I started to notice people looking like camera/photo hobbyists around, which must mean that their objective is same as mine (or why the heck would they be in a such dirty place at a such horrible time?) Still, no line was formed. (Is everyone enjoyong their morning walk?) Around nine o'clock, the employees of the store showed up and started to get ready for the opening and I just busted in.

The kind and generous manager allowed me to buy the E-P1 early and other buyers started to appear as I pulled out my credit card. I am very very pleased and happy that my objective has been well achieved, but this sales strategy, which took me two months to finally get my hands on a E-P1, is making many tired for the price of saving a couple of hundred thousand Korean wons. Also, I am more than positive that the fate of E-P1 will become the fate of what E-400 was, but I will always be happy with E-P1, as long as it works to record many of our happy memories.

Google Korea Celebrates Hangul Day with Google Style

October 9th is the Hangul Day. Hangul is the characters Koreans use today. It goes back to the early Chosun dynasty, when Koreans spoke Korean, but used Chinese characters to write. Koreans read Chinese characters similar to the way Chinese read in the Tang dynasty (around 618~907 A.D.) So, it was difficult for Koreans to read and many people were illiterate. After hundreds of years of using Chinese characters, the great King Sejong (1397~1450 A.D.) worked with the scholars of Jiphyeonjeon for more than 3 years and made the Korean characters, Hangul. Hangul was announced to the people of Chosun in the year 1446 named as Hoonminjeongeum, meaning "correct pronounciations that educates the people" and had several change of names, but now it sticks as Hangul meaning simply "Korean characters".

Hangul was invented very scientifically and is also known as one of easiest characters to learn. This has also been recognized by world scholars that the UN officialy recommends Hangul to countries (or tribes) that doesn't have its own characters and UNESCO has been giving awards named "King Sejong Literacy Prize" to persons that fight against illiteracy.

Enough for the introduction. So, today is Hangul Day and Google (Korea) again did not dissapoint us. I leave this screenshot of today's Google banner in support of Google's fight against AIDS, aliens, cancer, corruption, evil.......................................................................

 
 YOU! ALSO CAN READ... HANGUL!