At 03:15 PM 8/29/00 -0700, you wrote:
>I just got back from the Seybold Convention and Expo in San Francisco. At
>the Oly booth I asked about a digital body for all my Oly OM glass. The
>answer was from a rep was, "Not that I know of."
>"
>He then went on to give a curious answer as to why not. "The OM lenses do
>not work for digital imaging." He said that lenses focused images by the
>rays crossing and the CD chip needed all the light beams to be coming in on
>a straight axis because the pixel receptors were like a cup and the light
>had to reach the bottom. The present OM lenses land the images at an
>angle. I said, "Hunh???" That was about all he was able to say. I said
>my undergraduate course in optics must have been under different laws of
>physics. It seems to me that exact parallel beams would only exist in an
>infinitely small point at the center of the image.
That may be true, but it hasn't stopped Canon, Nikon, Minolta, Fuji, and
Kodak from making cameras that use 35mm SLR lenses. There's no real optical
design principles difference between Olympus lenses and those of the other
makers. They do tend to use only the center of the image circle. If
anything, the Canon EOS lenses should have the worst problem because their
large mount opening has made it possible for their lenses to have exit
pupils that subtend a greater angle. That's how they can have lenses like
24/1.8 and 50/1.0. The real difference is that companies that buy
$5000-20000 digital SLRs have expensive stocks of Nikon and Canon lenses
which they want to keep using (for both film and digital). Some of them used
to have Olympus. Olympus dropped the pro film camera market well before
digital came along, and they haven't made any real attempt to enter the pro
digital (other than medical-scientific) market.
Paul Farrar
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