Thought you folks might enjoy hearing the latest in Lens design from Japan. I run an industrial/military based optical company in the US and I am in Japan this week working on a few programs. In any event, I had a chance to sit down with some local lens designers and get their take on the latest trends.
Just so everybody knows companies like Canon, Nikon and Minolta do not necessarily design all of their own optics. They are often farmed out to be designed and manufactured by a number of OEM manufactures here in Japan. It always amuses me when the yahoos get on their soap boxes and claim one manufactures lenses are so much better then another’s. Truth is competing brands could very well have been designed and manufactured in the same place. The only real differences in designs between manufactures come from the design software (very critical in optics!) and to a lesser degree the opto-mechanics that controle focus. Up until recently the design software being used by everyone was pretty much home grown. According to my friends in Japan this has really changed in the past few years. As it turns out the Japanese are abandoning their home grown software in favor of commercial optical design software developed in the US for commercial and military purposes. The result is that everyone’s designs are starting to look the same and as time goes on the only factor that will separate lenses in terms of true image quality will be price.
So what is my take? With any luck companies like Sigma and Tamron will continue to put price pressure on the high-end optics from Canon and Nikon. Given that the preformance is likely to be the same (except for those who can’t get over the brand loyalty in their head) it should make for more competition. Of course there will always be good and bad lenses but that is to be expected from a marketing point of view. I also think the smaller guys also need to improve their opto-mechanics a bit.
So is there any disruptive technology out there? Most of the people I talked to didn’t think so. One Nikon designer told me off the record that he felt Canon has the lead in terms of intellectual property. Canon typically files more optical patents than any companies in the world. However as someone who uses advanced optical technology similar to Canons for military applications, I can tell you the cost point is not there yet! Thus we are likely to see the differences between brands become more about good marketing…sort of like refrigerators I suppose
Just so everybody knows companies like Canon, Nikon and Minolta do not necessarily design all of their own optics. They are often farmed out to be designed and manufactured by a number of OEM manufactures here in Japan. It always amuses me when the yahoos get on their soap boxes and claim one manufactures lenses are so much better then another’s. Truth is competing brands could very well have been designed and manufactured in the same place. The only real differences in designs between manufactures come from the design software (very critical in optics!) and to a lesser degree the opto-mechanics that controle focus. Up until recently the design software being used by everyone was pretty much home grown. According to my friends in Japan this has really changed in the past few years. As it turns out the Japanese are abandoning their home grown software in favor of commercial optical design software developed in the US for commercial and military purposes. The result is that everyone’s designs are starting to look the same and as time goes on the only factor that will separate lenses in terms of true image quality will be price.
So what is my take? With any luck companies like Sigma and Tamron will continue to put price pressure on the high-end optics from Canon and Nikon. Given that the preformance is likely to be the same (except for those who can’t get over the brand loyalty in their head) it should make for more competition. Of course there will always be good and bad lenses but that is to be expected from a marketing point of view. I also think the smaller guys also need to improve their opto-mechanics a bit.
So is there any disruptive technology out there? Most of the people I talked to didn’t think so. One Nikon designer told me off the record that he felt Canon has the lead in terms of intellectual property. Canon typically files more optical patents than any companies in the world. However as someone who uses advanced optical technology similar to Canons for military applications, I can tell you the cost point is not there yet! Thus we are likely to see the differences between brands become more about good marketing…sort of like refrigerators I suppose
