Poll, R mount and 3ed party lenses

noggin2k1 wrote:

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

As I’m getting bored of people misrepresenting the early FE days. I was there as an active user.

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.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. All of their designs were native mirrorless. You’re thinking of Canon, who decided to stick empty tubes/teleconverters into their big whites and release them as “native” RF designs. Sony did release some subpar lenses in the beginning, but mostly because they were prioritizing small size and light weight above all else. And they also did put out some great designs, even in the beginning - the ZA 55mm f/1.8 put to shame any and all fast 50’s ever made by Canon and Nikon, the ZA 16-35mm f/4 was highly competitive and quite a bit smaller than any comparable zoom for DSLRs, and the 28-135mm f/4 G was the first motorized professional zoom lens ever made for a consumer digital system.

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

Not really. It’s fair to say that some third party lenses, especially the Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8, have driven some sales and made the system more popular, but the reality is that Sony gained traction thanks to their bodies first, lenses second. Adapters were far more important to its popularity than third party lenses - loads of people sampled or switched to Sony E mount because they could adapt their Canon EF, Leica M, or film era lenses to it. By 2018, Sony had released enough competitive lenses themselves to make E mount a credible alternative.

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?

Yes. Canon and Nikon have had to live with third party lenses for over 70 years, and they’re still kicking around. Even during bad times, when the market was stagnant and economic hardships caused sales to drop, like the mid to late ‘70s.

Fast forward 5 years when the vast majority of FE lens purchases are 3rd party - where is Sony's incentive to carry on?

Where do you get this statistic from? And even if it were true, Sony’s financials show that it’s a good gamble: they sell less volume than Canon, but make more money on each item sold. People who purchase Sony systems spend more on bodies and lenses on average. If anything, it’s Canon who are in this trap, especially since that massive EF catalog isn’t going anywhere.

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.

It’s not a good idea to lock your front door but leave the back one open, if you want to keep people out of your house. So, either Canon suffer the same fate as Sony, just through an adapter instead of natively, or they will eventually kill/maim EF mount compatibility in the future… and then, where do you draw the line as a customer?