Now I KNOW Sony has gone mad

They plan on making even CHEAPER lenses for the NEX cameras! The
lenses they have now are almost garbage, terrible performers and they
want to cheapen them??! I'll be the first to say, if you must cut
costs, change the metal lens bodies for plastic and leave what little
optical quality you have alone.

 

Sony has never been a lens specialist. They may not appreciate the importance
of the glass.

 

In which case I guess their next move will be to drop the deal with Zeiss
to make expensive lenses for their cameras.

 

All these years of making video and still cameras and they still don't
know?

Regards,

Eric Stevens

 

Haven't they already done so? My little Sony camera doesn't say Zeiss on the
lens, but older Sony models did, as I recall.

 

They've never made lenses. Designing and manufacturing lenses is a very
specialized field. Companies like Zeiss and Leica know how to do it. Companies
like Sony don't. On its pro gear, Sony has always used someone else's glass.
Fujinon is very well known for studio camera lenses (which cost about half a
million dollars each), with Sony only building the camera head. Ditto for
smaller pro cameras. Sony doesn't make professional still cameras.

 

So why has/does Sony used/use expensive lenses if they don't "
appreciate the importance of the glass"?

Regards,

Eric Stevens

 

When have they used expensive lenses?

An expensive lens costs about ten times as much as the camera body. No camera
with a built-in lens that costs $500 or even $1000 has anything close to an
expensive lens.

 

For the sake of this argument, you have defined 'expensive' lenses.

When you are referring to non-expensive lenses, what price range do
you have in mind?

Regards,

Eric Stevens

 

Well, everything is relative, but clearly a $300 Tamron is less of an
expensive lens than a $3000 Nikkor or a $10,000 Leica lens.

Before I bought my first really good lens, I wondered if the very expensive
glass was worth the money. One look through the viewfinder told me that it
was. Unfortunately, once you've shot with pricey glass, you can't settle for
anything less, and if your budget shrinks, you are endlessly frustrated.

 

No. Zeiss don't make all their lenses, just certain rather specially
good ones. And are continuing to bring out new ones.

 

I just had a look at the UK prices of Sony's Zeiss lenses for their
alpha mount DSLRs. There's six listed. Five are over 1,000 UK pounds
in price, the most expensive being 1,700 UK pounds. Is that expensive
enough for you?

Note by the way that an optically top notch lens needn't be
expensive. The classic "nifty fifty" 50mm f1.4 DSLR lenses are an old
well honed simple design and by your standards are cheap lenses, yet
their image quality is hard to beat.

On the other hand there are some extraordinarily expensive lenses
whose image quality is pretty iffy -- because they're very hard indeed
to design and manufacture, made in very small numbers, and high image
quality is simply out of the question.

 

If you investigate you will find that Zeiss does not actually make the
lenses for Sony video cameras any more than Zeiss makes the lenses for
65 buck Logitech webcams.

What they do is design the lens, provide a set of standards, provide
advisors who assist in setting up the production line, and provide
continuing quality control. The actual production is done by Sony (or
Logitech) employees to Zeiss standards. Or to Sony standards, whichever
is higher.

 

Those aren't built-in lenses, are they?

They've been around for practically a century, and they are not difficult to
build.

 

You didn't really expect a factually supported statement.

 

No, but it does seem odd that a company which allegedly doesn't
realise the importance of high quality lenses would be commissioning
and selling such lenses. And where it matters, they have put Zeiss
lenses into non-exchangealbe lens cameras, such as the R1, whose lens
was so good several reviewers suggested that to buy its quality in a
DSLR lens you'd have to pay a lot more than the price of the camera
(because the same optical quality is easier to get if you can get the
rear lens elements closer to the sensor than a DSLR mirror permits).

Exactly. Which is why you don't always have to pay at least several
hundred dollars to get optically top quality.