Friday rant: The future of Canon RF and 3rd party lenses

KevinRA wrote:

sportyaccordy wrote:

JoWinter wrote:

At the risk of sounding dramatic, if it came down to a choice of only having Canon brand lenses available for my camera or not having Canon cameras available to buy, obviously I'd choose the former. To put it another way, if the camera division doesn't make enough money, it will go away. If blocking third party AF lenses is what it takes, that is an acceptable price, to me.

I hope not, but perhaps this is really where we stand at this point.

the more time goes the bigger the gap will be between current and SLR glass, both in unique offerings as well as performance.

How? When EF glass works seamlessly - and many EF lenses are already close to perfection optically and AF very well?

Look at 50mm f/1.4 options for the RF camera. There was a time when the EF 50mm f/1.4 Art was considered to be a wide open sharp lens. That's history now. There was also a time large aperture primes where considered to be unable to have fast AF anyway due to large glass elements etc etc. Looking at the 50mm f/1.2 GM that's history as well.

You're talking about close to perfection, but only very few lenses are. The 40mm f/1.4 Art, 50mm f/1.2 GM and RF 85mm f/1.2L are pretty much perfect optically, but only the 40mm Art and 50mm GM are perfect for AF. To be honest, the perfect AF-ing f/1.4 or f/1.2 85mm simply doesn't exist yet regardless the mount.

There's no zoom close to optical perfection anyway. There is a reason primes do exist.

So the argument "there's no scope for improvement so EF lenses will compete well even in the future" won't hold true. Yes, EF will last a long time if you're shooting 40mm only and willing to accept 1200 grams + adapter, but as soon as you want an up to date 50mm for you RF camera for both IQ and AF you're in trouble.

It would take some sort of transformation functionality of a new camera requiring new lenses to really make a big difference

I think the FE 50mm f/1.2 and f/1.4 GM lenses are examples of that transformation, and the Sigma 50mm f/1.4 DN to a lesser extend as well, and EF simply can't compete. Even RF can't compete. I'm not saying that transformation is done yet for all types of lenses (it isn't for 85mm for instance), but it's in progress, definitely.