Comment by strogonoff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by strogonoff | Hacker News Reader

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Regarding products from China being cheaper: remember that Japanese, Korean, and Western companies are the ones mostly innovating and absorbing the R&D costs. Remember how modern OLEDs were made feasible basically by LG and Samsung? Having stolen that IP[0][1][2], without any R&D costs but with dirt cheap manufacturing due to direct and indirect subsidies like relatively almost nonexistent labour protection laws, PRC companies could of course immediately flood the market with cheaper alternatives.

You can choose your suppliers by other measures than merely price. Arguably, you should if the market you are particupating in is not free and fair in this way.

Personally, as a happy owner of a Japanese-made under-$2k camera that works perfectly well for all purposes and even has official CAD files published for accessory 3D printing enthusiasts, I see no reason to switch to a Chinese brand (well, also there is no product that beats it on both specs and price, but even if there was I would think twice). People tend to over-generalize, but reality is not as simple as “all manufacturers from %country1% are better because X and all manufacturers from %country2% suffer from issue Y”.

[0] https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.amp.asp?newsIdx=113...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/south-korea-indic...

[2] https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2024-07-19/busines...

What you say about innovation has been true mostly in the distant past and mostly for technologies that are used in business-to-business products.

For consumer products from recent years, like smartphones or computers, the vast majority of innovative products are Chinese, even if the quality or documentation is frequently subpar.

Now I see very frequently cases when US companies or Japanese companies should better start to copy the Chinese if they want to stay competitive, but instead of doing that, they push for the same kind of tariff protections for which the US heavily criticized any other country in the past and blackmailed them in various ways to force them to remove the tariff protections against US companies.

I think it goes both ways for sure. My Sony mirrorless camera is incredible - and there's been lots of R&D work over decades that have made my camera possible.

But I got a DJI Ronin (handheld gimbal) the other day. Its a gamechanger. With the camera mounted on the gimbal, I can do handheld shots that you could easily use in a blockbuster movie.

The only downside is that the whole thing (camera + gimbal) is a very awkward package. The weight is in the wrong place. And that means the gimbal needs to be bigger and bulkier to compensate - which in turn makes it even more awkward to use. You could make a much better product by integrating the gimbal and camera. Put just the lens and sensor on the gimbal, but move the screen, battery and CPU to the "outside" package. Then you could shrink the gimbal itself and remove all the mounting hardware and manual weight adjustment sliders.

Apparently DJI has started making $10k cinema cameras along exactly these lines. I really hope the Japanese camera brands take notice. From a product standpoint, its a big deal - and I'm sure it won't be long before DJI makes much cheaper video cameras that start seriously eating Sony & Canon's market share.

In the OLED example people were indicted in 2018 and went to prison in 2023 or 2024. You are making it seem like it’s an old story, but it’s not really true.

"Long before the United States began accusing other countries of stealing ideas, the U.S. government encouraged intellectual piracy to catch up with England’s technological advances. According to historian Doron Ben-Atar, in his book, Trade Secrets, “the United States emerged as the world's industrial leader by illicitly appropriating mechanical and scientific innovations from Europe.”

Everyone is a thief.

https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...

Weren’t people in the US doing so at that point actually fresh English/Irish themselves who just moved or were moving to the new world? Can you elaborate how it is similar to the situation with PRC now, unless you suggest it’s freshly founded by Americans?

Samsung is not exactly averse to IP theft eg [1, 2] ... If you are responsible for 22.4% of South Korea's GDP [3], one may wonder if we even hear about all other cases ...

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2015/08/25/tsmc_samsung_espionag...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/legal/samsung-hit-with-303-mln-jury-...

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1314374/south-korea-sams...

>Remember how modern OLEDs were made feasible basically by LG and Samsung?

That was Japan's game to lose and their loss was absolutely deserved. Japanese companies are more interested in bickering with each other, while Korean and Chinese companies have bigger worldly goals.

Japan Display[1] and Renesas[2] could have been the LG/Samsung had Japan realized much sooner that there are better things to be doing than dragging each other down.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Display

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renesas_Electronics

I am not sure what you are saying. LG and Samsung are both Korean… They had the original OLED tech that was leaked to China. LG recently had to shut down a factory due to reduced demand IIRC. Hard to compete with fully state-controlled command economy.

>I am not sure what you are saying.

Japanese companies spent time and money investing in new technologies and then proceeded to waste them because they were far more interested in keeping trade secrets to themselves and dragging each other down, rather than coming together and acting as one national industry like Korean and Chinese companies. The Japanese companies did come together eventually (Japan Display, et al.), but way too late.

Okay. Just confusing because my example was about Korean companies. They were very much open to trade and less focused on secrets, which I suppose led to exactly the situation described. Once Apple switched to BOE for cheaper OLED panels (allegedly resulting in a higher rate of defects in iPad screens), LG was forced to shut down an entire plant IIRC.

> Personally, as a happy owner of a Japanese-made under-$2k camera that works perfectly well for all purposes and even has official CAD files published for accessory 3D printing enthusiasts,

Which camera is that?

Sigma fp.

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