Andrew, your brickwall with Cosina does not surprise me. About a year ago I
was researching Cosina for an article on www.zone-10.com but kept coming up
against layers and layers of privacy. This is a company that builds stuff
for pretty much everybody (especially lenses--they're the number one
builder of lenses for projectors). They seem to value their relationship
with the other companies enough that they are very private about revealing
anything to anybody. But at the same time, if you did a tear-down on a
product you can see that Cosina is the source for a lot of stuff.
Your seeing how the manufacturers cooperated amongst themselves is very
evident today. If you look at the common P&S camera, you'll see that they
are almost all identical. In fact, over a three-year period of time, a
particular brand will have evolved their design to be that of what another
company had two years earlier. It's not that they are copying each other,
but that they literally are purchasing the designs and manufacturing from a
third-party source. The other issue has to do with patents and
cross-licensing. It would be terribly hard to build a camera solely on your
own patents. Everybody cross-licenses. Furthermore, these manufacturers are
buying sub-assemblies from each other.
Cosina is smack in the middle of all this. Cosina is one of the rare
companies in the world that has their own design, engineering and
prototyping facilities. You could go to that company and order up whatever
you want. They'll do everything for you and deliver a product to whatever
price-point you want.
I've noted that there is one company that could end up being the primary
camera company in the world and that's Cosina. But in reality, they
probably already are. They don't have to worry about market share in the
industry. As long as precision optical products are sold anywhere in the
world by anybody, that they will have a piece of the action.
AG
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