Universal Lens Mount, Already!

You can spend several hundred or several thousand dollar$ on a quality lens for an SLR camera.

What are these lenses comprised of? Several groups of high quality, finely ground, shaped, clustered, coated and engineered GLASS, which orchestrate to bring an external image into perfect focus on the "film plane" (or sensor) in the camera.

That's what lenses are. The best lenses are crystal clear, free of distortion from corner to corner. The bigger the lens aperture, the more light passes through, therefore the "faster" the lens. The better the glass, coating, optical engineering, etc... the better the lens. And the more expen$ive, understandably.

However, if you buy a Nikon lens, it will only work on a Nikon camera. Same for a Canon, Pentax, Sony, etc.

What's the main difference between the best Canon glass and the best Nikon glass? The physical mount, the part that attaches the lens to the camera. It's trivial, but that is the main difference! (There are also electrical contacts that enable the lens and camera to talk to each other about exposure, focus, etc.)

If a photographer has $10,000 invested in Canon lenses, they can't use them on a Nikon body, and vice versa.

This is not right, and it's not necessary. It's a huge waste of money on many fronts. 3rd party lens makers like Sigma and Tamron (who also make very good lenses) have to make identical lenses with different mounts for these different cameras. Stores have to stock all these lenses separately. Ultimately, of course, no one besides us customers pay for the extra cost of this.

How would we like it if some appliances we buy would not plug into the common electrical outlets in our homes? "Oh, you have to live in a YELLOW home, or on the ODD side of the street, or on the EAST side of town, to use THOSE appliances."

Seriously? Yes, this is what camera companies are doing. Historical reasons? Understandable. Today? No excuse.

So here's my request: Nikon! Canon! Please... get your heads together and move to a universal mount with your new cameras. All it takes is your willingness to do the right thing and willingness to make the engineering decision. I'm 95% confident (but what do I know) that there's probably a way for prior lenses to be made compatible with the new universal mount bodies, maybe with a minor effect on focal length.

You'd be doing us all a favor. You might even sell more lenses! Right now, though you both make excellent lenses, you don't directly compete with each other for lens quality, because your lenses are compatible only with the dedicated-mount camera bodies. That's the wrong thing to do.

Universal mount is the right thing to do. Will you do it?