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

Jonathan Thill wrote:

CamerEyes wrote:

PhotoKhan wrote:

Every now and then, I take a pause from using my almost magically-competent, performing and engaging Canon RF gear - an experience that almost touches perfection - and drop by threads like this one to have a good laugh.

I am always left wondering: Is it more tragic that people will never know what they could be benefiting from or that they seem so unsatisfied and frustrated with what they use that they have to start this kind on nonsensical, sad, sad "discussions"?

PK

That's a sweeping oversimplification and a rather laidback generalization. We cannot polarize people here into "frustrated" versus "making do with what I have."

All of us here are actively using Canon gears and have likely sank a good amount of money on such. Asking Canon to be more liberal about third-party lenses is not expressing frustration. It is elevating a request to a level where we might get heard.

Asking a company to act against their own best interest does not make a lot of sense.

It's not different from users here sharing bugs or glitches, that eventually get addressed via firmware updates.

The two things are VERY different. Asking for bug fixes or improvements does not impact the bottom-line at Canon. Asking\Demanding that Canon allow another company to steal sales from them is self serving and lacks basic understanding how capitalism works.

What's troubling is such labeling, the generalization thrown at people asking for more from Canon, as if the only acceptable demeanor here is to behave and sing praises at Canon and megaphone the quest for progress versus perfection - or one belongs to the frustrated lot.

The trouble is "asking for more from Canon" is asking the wrong company. The 3rd parties are the companies at fault here.

Canon does not have a history of licensing their mount\protocols with anyone. So these 3rd parties have to figure out how to reverse engineer the RF autofocus protocols without infringing on Canon's patents\IP.

Canon is not going to make it easy for anyone to take money from them or their share holders in this contracted market.

There’s a huge issue with that scenario. Take for example Sigma’s recent 20mm and 24mm f1.4 Art DG DN Art lenses that are available on E and L mount with no issues that reverse engineering can bring. If they released those lenses on RF but reversed engineered and with some compatibility issues RF customers would complain and rightfully so. The problem is that the same lenses work with no issues on 2 other platforms and thus Canon would be blamed again for not giving Sigma a license. That’s a situation that Canon, Sigma and customers would all find unacceptable.

Besides I was told last year by UK Sigma rep that they are waiting on licenses from both Canon and Nikon before releasing anything on either platform. Sigma now have an agreement with Nikon. If Canon don’t agree to give Sigma a license I’m almost certain they will not reverse engineer the RF mount.