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.

Brand loyalty does blind.

The customer's interest matters too, and matters more. It's the reason choices exist, and that customer ultimately make customer-centric brands win. The flipside of that is they make the opposite of customer centricity suffer.

And no, this is not mental gymnastics. As I now shoot with Canon and Sony, the capabilities of their FF cameras are no longer in the phase of EOS R vs A7III / A7RIII. These days their cameras are nearly identical in IQ, AF, DR, etc.

Thus a more affordable set of options for native lenses become a differentiator. It does not for people married to Canon more than they are to their spouses, like you. It is a big deal for people moving up to FF for the first time, where cost of ownership is an incentive.

It is a blessing that Canon is not a pharmaceutical company that owns the patent for  treatment to some nasty life-threatening disease.