Page 306 - Friedman Archives

306 “Custom” (Gear icon) Menu Settings

license the format from us, and in exchange we’ll give you the information
we need to make your lenses play nicely with our current and future camera
bodies!”

rd
Most 3 party lens manufacturers complied, but at least one manufacturer
(okay, it was Sigma) said “Nuts to that!” and they went ahead and reverse-
engineered the Minolta lens-to-body protocol, creating their own chip
which seemed to mimick the Minolta lens behavior perfectly. (They did
this with the Canon and Pentax lens mount protocols, too.) Nothing wrong
with that, I guess, but it seems that some of the Sigma lenses “lied” about
their identity to the Minolta camera body. A 500mm f/4.5 Sigma lens, for
example, might communicate that it was a Minolta 400mm f/4.5 lens to the
camera. This strategy didn’t seem to impact camera behavior, so Sigma
continued this approach for many years. Minolta was peeved but
consumers liked their Sigma lenses, and for the most part the Sigma lenses
worked fine on most Minolta camera bodies .
2
Fast-forward to today. Sony introduces cameras with the Micro-adjustment
feature, but are VERY worried that attaching such an aforementioned older
Sigma (which lies about its identity) will overwrite the values of a
legitimate Minolta or Sony lens, unbeknownst to the user (“Hey, why did
my Minolta 400mm f/2.8 lens’s micro-adjustment values get changed when
I tweaked the micro-adjustment values for my older Sigma 500mm lens??”)
And so, Sony issued this cryptic warning saying simply “Don’t use this

2 (Historical note: Sigma’s strategy never caused a problem until the year 2000, when
Minolta updated the lens-body protocol to allow ADI (Advanced Distance
Integration) flash metering to work properly. Suddenly the reverse-engineered
Sigma lenses wouldn’t work on the new bodies. Sigma handled the deluge of
customer complaints swiftly by agreeing to re-chip the non-compliant lenses for
free, and it is assumed that Sigma paid the official licensing fee from that point on,
realizing that it was cheaper to comply than it was to handle all of these chip
upgrades. So new Sigma lenses aren’t plagued with compatibility issues like the
older lenses were.)

Contents of this book Copyright © 2014 Gary L. Friedman. All rights reserved.