I love it when capitalism works to the consumer advantage

[crimbfighter]

This obviously applies to many aspects of consumer life, but I love when healthy business competition knocks the elite from their podium when they have assumed they would sit up there forever.

Big price drop on the Zeiss 15mm, 18mm and 135mm lenses after Sigma’s announcement | Nikon Rumors

With the advancement in the quality of the more main stream third party lens manufacturers, the elite manufacturers are finally realizing they need to compete to stay relevant. Will Zeiss go out of business? Surely not. But it's nice to see prices come down after their long standing hold on the top end of the market.

 

[Derrel]

WOW! Those are really BIG price drops! The 135mm f/2 APO-Sonnar was written up a few years ago by the late Michael Reichmann, founder of The Luminous Landscape, in an article entitled something like The Zeiss 135mm f/2 APO-the Perfect Lens? The lens was reviewed by him, and it had the qualities everybody wants: astounding, smooth bokeh, high resolving power, high microcontrast, and true apochromatic design so the three primary colors of light all come to perfect focus, freedom from chromatic aberration of both axial and longitudinal varieties--in short, very,very close to a PERFECT lens for its type and length. The pictures backed up the review: astounding clarity, gorgeous lens drawing style, beautiful bokeh...just AMAZING images.

The drawback? Manual focusing, in an era of viewfinders where the factory focusing screens in d-slrs are NOT designed for manually focusing, and where for example, the high-end Canon 1D Mark III had a viewfinder screen that Canon's Chuck Westfall described as showing about "f/4.8" viewfinder DOF, according to his statements. I would assume about the same for Nikon cameras: the viewfinder screens for most d-slrs are smooth-ground, and the scatter level is low, so the visual DOF we see is deeper than the lens max aperture, so it is **very** much harder to see the in-focus or the out-of-focus unless one installs an old-fashioned viewfinder screen--that is if one is even made for one's camera.

The timing on these price drops gives huge credibility to Sigma! This is a BAD PR move on the part of Zeiss built by Cosina, Japan. But the simple fact is, the people who buy lenses for test chart bragging will like the Zeiss lenses, and they are fine lenses--as long as the focxus is perfectly NAILED. The Sigma ART AF lenses are AF lenses, which means moving subjects are pretty easy to get focus on. That was/is always the challenge with a manually focusing lens. If the focus is missed by six inches, that 36-MP D810 bcomes more like a 6MP D70.

Sigma sold more lenses last year than Nikon did.

 

[astroNikon]

Amazon dropped their minimum for free shipping too in order to match Walmart.

 

[hamlet]

If you like cold stale lab comparisons, here is the 85mm sigma vs zeiss. This is a very remarkable comparison knowing the price difference: Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art Lens Image Quality

 

[crimbfighter]

If you like cold stale lab comparisons, here is the 85mm sigma vs zeiss. This is a very remarkable comparison knowing the price difference: Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art Lens Image Quality

Interesting. It almost looks like the Sigma edges out the Zeiss, except maybe in CA control.

 

[hamlet]

If you like cold stale lab comparisons, here is the 85mm sigma vs zeiss. This is a very remarkable comparison knowing the price difference: Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art Lens Image Quality

Interesting. It almost looks like the Sigma edges out the Zeiss, except maybe in CA control.

Ive seen other images of the sigma 85mm and the chromatic arbitration is consistent as in the one you're looking at. Sigma seem to overdo themselves with each successive lens release as their production and research become more streamlined, i wouldn't be surprised if the next lens just goes that extra length and just does away with the chromatic aberration.

 

[Solarflare]

Wrong on both accounts.


First of all, "consumer profit from capitalism"

1. Capitalism never works in favor of the consumer. What you talk about is free market - prices are descided by the market. Thats a completely different thing.

2. Especially capitalism opposes free market because capitalism always wants to control the market by attaining a monopoly.

3. Contrary to popular belief (cold war propaganda, actually), capitalism also doesnt depend upon the existence of a free market. For example the UK between the world wars realized a capitalist planned economy. Capitalists LOVE that because that means automatic monopoly and never any competitor at all, state guaranteed !


Second of all, "the worlds best optics company cares about the absolutely worst"

1. If Zeiss would stop producing any consumer lens tomorrow their profit would hardly change at all. Just check out their website. Consumer lenses ? Very hidden among a ton of other applications.

2. In fact they dont even produce most of these lenses themselves. They get produced by Cosina in Japan. Thats how unimportant consumer lenses are for Zeiss. Theres simply not that much profit in it.

3. The 135mm, 15mm and 18mm have been replaced by their Milvus variant already. That means ALL these lenses arent even produced anymore.



So whats happening ? I think they are simply cleaning inventory. Basically the same happened before when they started the Milvus crap.