Tom Caldwell
New Member
Ricohfanboy":2pj7becs said:Well, just when you thought there was nothing in the pipeline: Photo Rumors reports that Ricoh filed a patent for a 5.3-22mm f/2-3.5 lens. Given that the equiv. focal length is 24-100mm, this lens is meant to cover a 1.7" sensor. The speculation on Photo rumours is it's either for a GXR module, or else the Pentax Q. But 24-100mm, couldn't this be the alternative to the Panasonic LX7 -- i.e., something like a GX300? Let's all keep our thumb's pressed it's GX* related!
Well, any spark can start a bushfire after the news-drought.
Good to see some posts on a fairly quiet forum. I am not about to carry on like a cracked record. My ideas are just ideas, not facts, not even rumours. Just "would it be possible?"
In any case I was reading somewhere else that there might be a move to LED based flash units in cameras. Apparently they are more compact, draw less power and don't need capacitors. Bear with me as it is not my technical forte and my memory for detail is not as good as it once was. With the obvious quantity of cheap, bright led-based torches whose batteries last forever it seems an interesting possibility.
LED based flashes have not yet become the flavour of the month and this is surprising, they have recently conquered car headlights, maybe there is some technical difficulty yet in putting out the huge short burst of light that camera flash units require? Be that it may a small article on the subject shows that something is happening in that area.
Why is this important to the current debate? Well I was at a loss to see how Ricoh could reduce the size of the current GXR back without deleting the inbuilt flash and probably the plug-in evf as well. "Maybe", I thought, "they could reduce the size of the lcd?" (Shock horror - lcd screens ALWAYS get bigger with higher resolution!)
Now the pieces of my "imaginary design" fall more readily into place. If the top mount on a GXR body were reduced in size to "a sliver" just big enough to fit a single horizontal array of a LED flash unit and the connector for the evf dispensed with then the height of the present GXR back could be reduced to not much more than the present GRD. The current width is much the same as the GRD. The GXR grip is deeper and this makes for a "thicker" unit, but perhaps the designer gurus in Ricoh R&D could slim this somewhat.
The result would be an "almost GRD size" camera back with GXR mount rails capable of accepting all current GXR modules. Unfortunately Ricoh GXR modules wear some bulk themself. I imagine most of those who want a new GRD-type would want the overall package with a retracting lens prime module to be in a size-equivalence of the present GRD.
There is more to patents than just being able to make a new design for the companies own use. Many companies make a helpful income stream from royalties on their patents even though they do not use them in their own products. If your R&D department comes up with a great new design that does not fit in with marketing then rather than abandon it, they just patent the design (advertise it) and it might just be exactly what some other company needs. Saves the other company the time and effort of designing something similar, paying a small royalty is the easiest thing to do.
No doubt designers don't just get their rocks off designing things that might just become useful one day so I think it reasonable that Ricoh had at least "an intent" to use this newly patented lens. But even so it might be some time before it actually finds it's way into a camera. The very fact that Ricoh is patenting lens designs shows that where there is design effort there must be camera-life (or so we might think).
The lens itself seems to be an update of the somewhat slow 3x zoom in the GX series (and S10 version for the GXR). The P10 and S10 modules are hardly over-popular modules on the GXR itself - they are an entry-level module but they do more things than the either the CX does or the GX did. One thing that I did not notice about the patent is just how "flat" it collapses, whether this is a design for a folding lens - I am just presuming that it is. If the newly patented lens is an upgrade for the S10 (matched to a new sensor) then we might wonder just why Ricoh picked the S10 to be the first module in the GXR range to be updated. It makes more sense if this is an ultra-flat faster 4x zoom module that might fit on a new GRD size body with GXR mount rails. In other words - "here is the GX300". Combine this with a nice fast collapsing prime module and perhaps everyone's wish for a GRD prime with new sensor and a zoom version will be satisfied. And of course all the other released GXR modules would fit as well. If you wanted an aps-c 50mm f2.5 macro for your GRD then - "here you are". If you wanted the smallest possible trick little LM mount body with aps-c sensor ... guess what ... it is only a whisker and wave of your credit card away.
Of course I am dreaming .... dreams might seem logical, but in the end they are just dreams.
Tom
