Poll, R mount and 3ed party lenses

davev8 wrote:

noggin2k1 wrote:

I'm getting a bit bored of this rhetoric now.

Look at Sony. When they launched FE, their in house lenses were absolute bobbins - the majority of which were simply DSLR designs shoehorned into mirrorless (some of which are still "current" designs now.

Without 3rd party support, FE mount would have been a car crash.

Putting the massive RF teles to one side, Canon has given us some brilliant "from the ground up" RF lenses. All alongside having full native support for that massive EF back catalogue, which in turn also works with 3rd party EF lenses.

Do you really think Sony's business model is sustainable? Fast forward 5 years when the vast majority of FE lens purchases are 3rd party - where is Sony's incentive to carry on?

i am with you on this... when you factor in that lenses have a bigger profit margin than bodys..this may be more so with Canon as they use more automation on assembling lenses than others on equipment they made themselves

It's possible Canon has a bit higher profit margin per lens (which isn't the same as higher profit margin overall) here, however, it's also possible Sony has a bit higher profit margin on bodies as Sony does a whole lot more with sensor tech, and bad ergonomics etc are cheaper to produce.

For glass Canon might also have the largest sales numbers for non L stm glass where the profit per lens is likely a bit lower. Canon is trying to keep customers satisfied with cheap stm AF, dark apertures (as "light weight is more value for money"     ), correction profiles upping the contrast and correcting distortion like crazy, no lens pouch and no sun hood, but at some point the price needs to be low enough to sell enough of these subpar lenses, and there's also the risk of loosing these shooters to phones in stead of making them pay the big bucks for the L options.

..but i think canon may be looking in 10+ years when the market may not sustain 3 big players i think we will find that sony has shot themselves in the foot

In a shrinking market third party manufacturers will need Sony as much as Sony will need third party manufacturers, and those third party manufacturers will understand this. This cross-dependency can't cause anything else than cooperation, and a change of strategy too so both Tamron/Sigma/Samyang and Sony can up the prices.

Even Canon can change it's strategy if they find out it's needed to do so. Why would it be different for Sony?

At the end of the day, not only we are speculating, but also Canon and Sony are just trying to see what works.

We're in a diminishing market. If locking in RF revenue to Canon keeps them investing in the platform, then that's absolutely fine by me. Photography is a business after all.