OM Camera - a new angle

[Attila Csipa]

On Tuesday 18 September 2007 03:27:24 Mikko Rauhala wrote:
> Presumably, this is all due to some sort of petty marketing policy to
> intentionally cripple the software on consumer goods with the goal to
> increase demand for their other devices. As someone having a clue or at

I've seen many photo cameras with such limitations (Fuji, Canon, the list goes 
on). I can't guarantee that my experience is valid for all of them, but for 
at least one I was in contact with, it was actually NOT a marketing policy 
but a technical limitation. In my case some control lines were multiplexed 
that made it impossible to use the electronic zoom and video capture at the 
same time. It seemed that the video recording option was an afterthought and 
the camera actually handled it as if it was a very long exposure photo but 
with 25fps sensor readouts during the exposure. If you think about it, from 
that standpoint it actually makes sense - ordinarily you do NOT expect to 
change focus or zoom _while_ taking a single photo. Rewriting the firmware, 
adding more control lines, more parallel functions are all things that should 
have been done to make it a 'proper' video recording device, but I can't 
really attribute that to malice, this was a hack to get video recording on a 
device that was not originally developed to do it. YMMV, some manufacturers 
might be doing what you say, but some aren't and it's pretty hard to tell 
from the outside :)