Why do major manufacturers like Canon, Nikon, Sigma not make manual lenses?

[Overread]

Isn't there a company that is already doing this - Ronkin or Roknin or something with some pretty decent optics in fully manual lenses.

 

[Gavjenks]

Yeah Rokinon (actual manufacturer is Samyang who sell their stuff under multiple brand names) is awesome.

But they only have like 5 appreciably different lenses (in variations ad infinitum), and 3 of them although good quality, are fairly boring (85mm 1.5, 35mm 1.5, and a not-actually-very-cheap tilt shift that gets pretty bad reviews on build quality). There are some impressive apertures, but you can already get really close to those numbers with any of a huge variety of old surplus manual lenses, etc. for just as cheap.

Their other two lenses however (14mm 2.8 and 8mm fisheye) do indeed push some serious boundaries, and do so in a performance optimized way fueled by a cheap lack of autofocus and electronics. They both very much take advantage of modern technology and design to do some crazy wide angle stuff at price points that would be inconceivable in the past, and in a market that has no other comparable options (the Canon 14mm of apparently similar quality costs about 5x as much).

That's exactly what I am looking for! But again, only two impressive specimens thus far. Definitely more interesting than the Cosina stuff (a 28mm, f/2.8 manual? really? There are literally dozens of models of exactly those manual stats, populating almost every single brand ever to have sold manual lenses, available for pennies everywhere)




edit: oh rokinon also has a fairly decent catadioptric 500mm that is kinda cool. Donuts, though.

 

[480sparky]

An excellent way to make this point of why they don't is to go into business for yourself. Start yourself your own company, manufacture manual focus lenses, and get back to us in five years and let us know how you're doing.

 

[gsgary]

Uh.... your solution to maximally cost-effective performance-oriented lenses is LEICA?!

leica lenses will better any canon and nikon you can fit Leica R lenses to Canon witb fantastic results

 

[amolitor]

Putting image stabilization in Canon's 70-200mm 2.8 lens apparently adds about $700 to the price.

It's not unreasonable to estimate that by removing autofocus and autoaperture, you could shave off another $500-$600.

It's completely unreasonable. On what basis do you make that leap?

 

[gsgary]

It's completely unreasonable. On what basis do you make that leap?

Dont think he has seen the price of Leica lenses no auto focus on them

 

[Gavjenks]

Putting image stabilization in Canon's 70-200mm 2.8 lens apparently adds about $700 to the price.

It's not unreasonable to estimate that by removing autofocus and autoaperture, you could shave off another $500-$600.

It's completely unreasonable. On what basis do you make that leap?

Image stabilization is not particularly more complicated of an engineering problem (in the modern day) than autofocus and aperture and wiring and remaining computer chips. So whatever their cost is for one + markup should be somewhat similar to their cost for the other + markup. I knocked it down a couple hundred to be conservative on top of that.

Note that although IS gets much more expensive with heavy glass to move around, so does autofocus with heavy glass to move around as well (and further to move it).

An excellent way to make this point of why they don't is to go into business for yourself. Start yourself your own company, manufacture manual focus lenses, and get back to us in five years and let us know how you're doing.

I am legitimately considering this and have been prototyping various ideas for some months now. My ideas and capabilities are completely different, however, from what a company like Canon or Sigma could do, though, obviously. I stand ZERO chance of making a competitive standard-purpose high performance lens, so the only way I would see more of those on the market would be though my voice as a consumer, not through manufacturing. Unless you have 50 million dollars you'd like to loan me.

Mostly, I'm just curious, though. Not upset about the lack of lenses.

leica lenses will better any canon and nikon you can fit Leica R lenses to Canon witb fantastic results

Leica lenses are like maybe 25% better on average in exchange for a 2,000% higher cost. Hence my emphasis on cost effective. They are not that. They are frilly high end designer "look at me I'm cool and rich and you should sleep with me" lenses.

Which is fine, more power to them. But not what I'm talking about at all. I'm talking about normal, affordable companies who already make normal lenses also making equally affordable lenses which have above-normal optical qualities in exchange for the cost savings of not always putting in auto-everything 100% of the time.


Derrel's points about the difficulty of manual focusing with modern screens and prisms pretty much answers why they don't do this currently for wide aperture lenses. (Although I still don't see why you couldn't just have the autofocus sensors in the body tell you when you have manually focused to the correct point)

 

[Dao]

First of all, when you buy a lens, you are not just paying for the cost of making the lens. The $500 to $700 different in cost of the non-IS vs IS lens is not the different in cost of putting the IS into the lens. What Canon/Nikon selling us is the technology or better yet, a feature. A feature that they believe that people will buy. If not, they will try to market it in a way that to make you believe you need that feature. If they succeed, great! If not, they will try again with different things.

A can of Pepsi cola cost 50 cents at the machine. Do you think if they just sell you a soda without any taste will cost a lot less? It is not going to be 10 cents nor 25 cents, not even 40 cents. It is going to be 50 cents or more. When you buy a bottle of Aquafina bottle water, you paid $1.50 or more. But that water is coming from the tap water (same with Coca-Cola Co's Dasani). Same thing, they are marketing a product and make you believe it is better and you need it. It works, so they continue to sell us the tap water. So since it is just tap water, should it be 10 cents per bottle? Nope. That is not going to be the case. Even if the cost of manufacturing the bottle water and deliver it to the consumer is 50 cents per bottle, they are going to sell it at $1 or more.

It is not because they should, it is because they can as long as the market allow them.

 

[usayit]

All this is moot....

Manufacturers are in the business to sell stuff for a profit, not to make it more affordable for the 1% that might care.

Bringing in Leica into the mix is kinda dumb:

R-lenses are no longer being made. You can generalize the conversation by considering older adapted (or not adapted) manual lenses.

M-mount Leica is a niche product and no where close to being an option for someone looking for ~cheaper~ options.

Leica is working in revenues in the few millions... Canon, Nikon, and the like are operating with revenues several times that. That's their target... tens of millions. You don't make that catering to a small group of consumers.



If its that important, I'd sell a few items and go with Nikon with its long support for manual focus Nikkor lenses. I'm sure there are used bodies that are old enough and good enough that it is far more cost effective to simply buy a Nikon body to be used specifically with those lenses. That's what I did with Pentax Kmount. I don't see the typical consumer buying a manual focus lens just to save a few bucks. Modern manual lenses that do exist (Zeiss, voigtlander, etc) are sold as niche products to a very small market.

 

[Dao]

One additional note on the high price items or luxury items. Manufacturers usually want or need to maintain that status. And they do not want to upset the consumers/owners of the high price / luxury items. That is a market that they do not sell a lot, but they can maintain a higher profit margin. They will do a lot of thing to protect that market.

If Canon make a cheap L lens, what will happen? A brand new 4 door BMW 3 series suddenly US$20,000 out of the door with non powered cloth seats, manual windows and door lock, regular grade audio system but still drive like a BMW 3 series? Will they able to sell a lot of them since it is great price for a BMW 3 series? I doubt it. It is not only they cannot sell the cheap 3 series well, but also destroying their name. It is possible that other expensive models sales will drop.

 

[Steve5D]

There are so many amazing things that could be done with modern lens technology and manufacturing methods to allow optically crazy lenses for affordable amounts of money, if you didn't have to cram in gyroscopes and motors into every lens.

I read the other thread that was just made recently about Sigma's new 18-35mm constant aperture f/1.8, and my immediate thought was "almost ALL lenses could have these sorts of advanced abilities for the same prices, if we weren't paying for all the electronic crap."

I'm not saying to stop making autofocus lenses. I'm saying to make both: autofocus lenses that have normal stats, and manual lenses that funnel all of those modern technology and engineering resources into crazily wide apertures or huge zooms that aren't low quality, or multiple diffractive optics featherweight tiny little 400mm lenses, or whatever, without ending up beyond the price that most of the market is willing to pay.

They do a LITTLE bit of this. For instance, tilt shifts from these companies are not autofocus, or for example, Canon's MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro has no autofocus. But these are cases where autofocus wouldn't really work very well, and they were forced not to do it. But all the same, this allows them to put the cost toward some amazing capabilities instead: tilft shift + large image circles. Or 5x sharp macro optics.

Why not do that sometimes WITHOUT being forced to do it by physics? Not everybody NEEDS autofocus or image stabilization or auto aperture all the time in every lens. Why do we want to pay for them every time in every lens, at the expense of other cool stuff we could be getting instead?

Why am I paying for autofocus or auto aperture, for example, in a typical fisheye lens, where my depth of field is like 20 meters most of the time, and where I never even change my working aperture for months on end? I'd much rather have it be $200 cheaper, or a few millimeters wider.

The answer is profoundly simple: They won't sell enough of them to make the investment, on their part, worthwhile.

I used to work for Taylor Guitars. The VP of Sales had a saying when someone suggested something along this same line: "We'll sell tens of them".

Bottom line is that there's not nearly the consumer demand for them, so it would be a waste of time and money for them...

 

[amolitor]

The volume on AF components is enormous. The R&D costs of AF bits and pieces have been defrayed over an immense number of lenses. To a somewhat lesser extent, autoaperture likewise.

The bill of materials cost of stuff like this is almost never a substantive part of the cost. In a lens the only stuff with BoM costs that even registers is the glass, I suspect. The rest is just plastic, some machined metal bits and pieces, some wires, some glue. It's all a couple bucks here and a few pennies there.

It's quite possible, just an example, that the $700 cost for in lens IS for the whatever-it-was includes defraying the cost of a $300,000 bespoke test jig to verify that the IS is working properly, while testing the AF and AA components is done on pre-existing equipment that's been paid off for a decade.

 

[Steve5D]

I have no doubt that the major lens manufacturers factor in the cost of all that plastic, machined metal bits and pieces, some wires, and the glue. All of it goes into the BoM...

 

[amolitor]

Sure, but the point is that you're not going to get to $700 with bits of plastic. You *can* get to $700 quite quickly in a low volume product amortizing the tooling costs for the plastic bits but that's not BoM cost.

Anyways, the point is 'it's $700 for such and such, to it must be about $600 for this other superficially similar thing' is a wild and unreasonable leap.

 

[pixmedic]

I have no doubt that the major lens manufacturers factor in the cost of all that plastic, machined metal bits and pieces, some wires, and the glue. All of it goes into the BoM...

I don't know anything about lens manufacturing...
but, I know that the company I work for has a dollar amount that is billed for pretty much everything. even equipment usage for stuff LONG paid for in full.
I dont know how much is charged, if that charge is scaled in any way, or even how they come to those numbers....but i DO know that there is a specific dollar amount charged for monitor use every time a PT needs a cardiac monitor even though our Lifepacks have already paid for themselves 10 times over or more.
This kind of charging could be industry specific....i really dont know. however, I dont see any reason why a company would stop factoring in equipment usage just because a machine is paid off. I would imagine that to be kind of the point. the machine pays itself off, then actually makes the company money.