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

[amolitor]

So that means that the 1200 5.6L only ever grossed a revenue of a couple of million dollars over the whole production run, and this was enough to justify it to Canon. Considering that 10% of the revenue of a product being R&D is really high even for a high tech camera company, this especially weird lens might have required let's say 15% R&D, or $300,000.

Where do you even come up with this stuff? On what basis are you throwing around "R&D budget of 10% of revenue is really high"? An outfit like Nikon is going to have wildly varying ratios across their product line. Just as a for instance, the annual report from Nikon in 2011 suggests R&D of $730M on revenues of $10B, or 7.3 percent overall, for the entire company, across all product lines.

 

[Gavjenks]

So in other words, I was pretty much spot on that 10% would be on the high end, and 15% would be especially high

Only rough numbers matter here anyway. The point is that the production runs would only have to be in the low ten(s) of thousands, which is appropriate for a somewhat but not entirely niche lens.

Go ahead and guess that it's 20% or 30%, even, if you want to go crazy. Still only translates out to low tens of thousands of units.

 

[table1349]

The Canon 1200mm f/5.6 L sold maybe a couple of dozen copies ever, at $80,000 each. And it wasn't a failing proposition for Canon, because they continued to manufacture more over the course of years. They wouldn't do that if they were losing money.

So that means that the 1200 5.6L only ever grossed a revenue of a couple of million dollars over the whole production run, and this was enough to justify it to Canon. Considering that 10% of the revenue of a product being R&D is really high even for a high tech camera company, this especially weird lens might have required let's say 15% R&D, or $300,000.

Even if a normal consumer run of the mill lens cost as much to design and prototype as that ridiculous thing (unlikely), and if it sold for about a normal $300, then you would only have to sell 10,000 units for R&D to be down to 10% of the revenue. Niche market is just fine at those amounts.




Plus, we already know that there are companies who DO sell brand new manufactured fully manual lenses. Like the aforementioned Rokinon. So there's obviously a market for them. And if Rokinon lenses fall apart in less than a year, then not only is there a market, but there's a market that could be serviced much better / taken over mostly by a more competent manufacturer for just a tad more money.

Well there you go then buy a Rokinon. Apparently Canon doesn't perceive that there is the market you feel there is. And if there is that market then you would be poised to develop it yourself and make millions.

 

[amolitor]

The Canon 1200mm f/5.6 L sold maybe a couple of dozen copies ever, at $80,000 each. And it wasn't a failing proposition for Canon, because they continued to manufacture more over the course of years. They wouldn't do that if they were losing money.

So that means that the 1200 5.6L only ever grossed a revenue of a couple of million dollars over the whole production run, and this was enough to justify it to Canon. Considering that 10% of the revenue of a product being R&D is really high even for a high tech camera company, this especially weird lens might have required let's say 15% R&D, or $300,000.

Spoken by a guy who's clearly never brought an electronic device to market. Passing various required RF emissions and immunity tests for an electronic device in all the different markets Canon sells into could cost $300,000 right there. I can flatly guarantee you that AFTER you have FULLY DESIGNED the lens and verified that the design works and is manufacturable, you have more than $300,000 in R&D expenses just to get from the prototype to a shippable, testable, legal product in a global market.

I would be very very surprised to learn that a product like this can be brought to market for less than $1M total R&D. Figure another few hundred grand for tooling and manufacturing setup, minimum, which is billed I dunno where. Then there's hinky inventory costing because you're clearly building this thing in small batches and storing stuff up. We'd probably all be astounded at how little of that $80,000 was actually spent on parts that went into the lens.

It's also quite possible that Canon lost their shirts on this thing. Look up "Halo Product".

 

[amolitor]

So in other words, I was pretty much spot on that 10% would be on the high end, and 15% would be especially high

You're making wild and unjustified assumptions about distributions here, and you know it. You're assuming something resembling a normal distribution (so that 'high end' end means something) with a very small standard deviation (so that 10 is 'on the high end' relative to a mean of 7.3). You're almost certainly wrong on both those counts.

 

[TCampbell]

I'm trying to understand your point in these manual-focus lenses...

Since you can just flick a switch on any of the auto-focus lenses and happily manual focus to your heart's creative content... what would the point of building dedicated manual-focus only lenses be? Are you thinking there would be a cost savings?

The thread has covered the end-user practical problems -- users have come to trust and expect lenses to auto-focus. As you pointed out above, Canon does make some lenses that aren't intended to sell in volume... but also remember that those lenses that don't sell in volume have fairly high price tags. When you buy an expensive tilt-shift, part of what you're paying for is that you're sharing not just the R&D costs... but also the productization costs with not very many other customers.

I've had this conversation numerous times in the auto-industry (this is an industry I grew up in.) Ford (we'll just pick on Ford) makes a Mustang and a Focus. The base price on a strip down Mustang is about $22k. The base price on a strip-down focus is about $16k. Here's the question: Do you believe it COSTS Ford an extra $6k to produce the Mustang?

The answer, it turns out, is absolutely not. The vast majority of the "cost" of the car is the loaded cost of overhead, salary, benefits, design time, testing (including crash testing where they have to destroy hand-made vehicles because the vehicle isn't yet approved for "production" yet.) It's not just the vehicle parts that have to be designed and engineered... there's an enormous amount of engineering that goes into developing the assembly line tooling that will be used to "build" the car. So even the amount of space in a plant, the number of machines and tooling, and staff to put it all together isn't actually significantly different. Yes... the Mustang does technically require more raw material to produce ... but it's not that much more. Turns out the auto-industry is a bit special in that they have to satisfy government "CAFE" standards and to do that they practically have to bribe people into buying the very fuel efficient cars (if all cars were sold at a profit, then the vast majority of consumers would only pick the gas guzzlers because most consumers want as much "power" as they can get.) So yes... technically the low-end cars made by your favorite auto-makers are actually sold at a loss, and those buying higher end cars are technically subsidizing the purchase of low-end vehicles to help the CAFE average of the "fleet".

Alas I digress.

The point of all that was this: the sum of the parts that go into making a "thing" are really just a tiny overall part of the actual costs to bring a product to market.

I suspect that a dedicated manual focus lens would require similar expenses to bring to production, but due to selling in low quantity, it would need to be expensive to make it worthwhile and thus probably not meet what I think your objective was... which was to make lenses that were less expensive.

If saving money is the primary objective... there are a number of 3rd party lenses that cost much less than the Canon and Nikon branded products.

 

[table1349]

I'm trying to understand your point in these manual-focus lenses...

Since you can just flick a switch on any of the auto-focus lenses and happily manual focus to your heart's creative content... what would the point of building dedicated manual-focus only lenses be? Are you thinking there would be a cost savings?

Tim, There is no room for common sense in a thread like this.

 

[amolitor]

I have heard that the BoM cost of a basic cheap GM sedan and a high end BMW sedan of similar size are actually within a few bucks of the same, just to underline that point. I think I read that in a statement from an auto industry exec who's worked both sides of the Atlantic, so I feel pretty good about its veracity. The costs are always elsewhere. BoM cost is important, especially with high volume stuff, but not really because it's where the money is going -- it's just the part of the money that's easiest to manage, predict, shrink and expand.

 

[amolitor]

I'm pretty sure Gavjenks wants Nikon et al to start building cheap manual focus lenses again.

Why is a bit of a mystery. If I want an MF Nikon lens, for instance, KEH has them by the container-full already.

 

[Stevepwns]

OK, so I dont have the experiance you guys have or the background or the knowledge... but I can address a couple things that you guys overlooked.
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The manual world of photography has pretty much run it's course, technology changed to make it easier and faster for anyone with a camera to produce simple images without having to worry about really having to know much about photography. I believe it's safe to say 99% of the people using digital cameras right now couldn't focus a manual lens with any kind of consistency, if they had to use one on a moving object the delete rate would be close to 100%. It is a skill that requires a lot of practice to get really good at.

The biggest issue with manual focus lenses on autofocus bodies is accurate focusing. In many shooting scenarios, manually focusing is pretty inaccurate for many shooters, due to the viewfinder screens most cameras have nowadays. The fine-grained, smooth, sometimes artificially brightened viewfinder screens AF bodies come with do not show the ACTUAL shallow depth of field, due to the way the viewfinder screens are ground; an f/1.2 lens for example, has depth of field that visually appears to be about f/4 on an AF viewfinder screen, give or take a bit, so focusing is VERY dicey on something like an f/1.2 lens. Of course the same caveat applies when using an autofocus 1.2 lens on an AF body equipped with an AF viewfinder screen. Canon's Chuck Westfall said that the new Canon viewfinder system in one of their modern-era DSLR models had an effective DOF representation of f/4.2, which was causing a ton of focusing issues for people using their 50/1.2 and 85/1.2-L models and trying to manually focus them...the human error in focusing is now a huge PITA...

Now personally I agree with the premise of the thread. I have found myself manually focusing more and more and don't have 1000 dollars to slap down on a lens just because I feel like it. I know that Sony is the red headed step child of photography but the referenced comments above, have been addressed by Sony. One, EVF, although not perfect but, you see what you get ( about 95% ) anyways. Two, My A77 has a feature that's called peaking, when in manual focus mode it highlights the FOV or the parts in focus with white highlights (or what ever color you choose). As you rotate the focus ring you can watch the band of highlights go father away or get closer. Effectively allowing you to watch the field of view travel across the EVF of the LCD on the back of the camera in real time. I would be a huge fan of manual focus lenses, the Sony also has the SteadyShot in body, not the lens, which allows for less BS in the lens also dropping the price. My Tamron 70 - 200 2.8 would be 1300 but because I don't need the stability function in lens, it only cost me 750. So they could offer an affordable tack sharp lens for those of us that don't need or don't want the electronics in it. I think its a very valid point.

 

[Kolia]

To echo Stevepwns's comment.

Sony's G lenses do not have IS yet still cost pretty much the same as their Nikon and Canon counter part.

As an automotive engineer myself, I find the speculative cost comparisons made yearly in the topic hilarious. I'm glad some managed to chime in with real experience.

 

[table1349]

To echo Stevepwns's comment.

Sony's G lenses do not have IS yet still cost pretty much the same as their Nikon and Canon counter part.

As an automotive engineer myself, I find the speculative cost comparisons made yearly in the topic hilarious. I'm glad some managed to chime in with real experience.

So what ever happened to that flying car idea that some people were touting back in the 60's? Seemed simple enough, just add an extra crank shaft for a propeller and some wings that fold up. Couldn't be that expensive.

 

[Kolia]

Lol !

Super convenient things these were !

My opinion on the manual lens topic is that CaNikon probably thinks that the niche market of high quality manual lenses is already used up by the likes of Leica and Zeiss.

Like mentioned earlier, the reason AF lenses are so cheap is probably because they make so many of them. A comparatively limited series of MF would cost more to produce.

 

[table1349]

There is a guy here that has and old Aero car that he found somewhere and completely restored. He doesn't fly it, but it is neat to look at when he has it put together.

 

[slow231]

HA at comparing AF and aperture selection to IS. Even on a manual lens, focus + aperture selection must eventually be translated to just rotating a single dial. figuring out how to actuate that single mechanism isn't rocket science. can you conceive of a single dial that would handle IS?

Uh yes, actually. IS is not nearly as complicated as you seem to be making it out to be. The core concept is like a high school science fair project level of complexity. It's basically a lens with some magnets and then another ring of magnets around it, and they turn on the magnets in the opposite direction that is detected by angle sensors, in 2 dimensions. The end, pretty much.

It is in a very real sense, a sort of electronic single "ring" that is spun to whatever the opposite of the resultant vector of motion is at any given time. Pretty much a 1-dimensional actuation if you think in polar coordinates, very similar to aperture or focus.

uhh why do you constantly talk about things you clearly have no clue about. first off to describe what you're doing you need two pieces of information, a direction and magnitude (ie which way to move and how much to move it). this not something you can represent with a single 1-D dial you simply turn from 0-10. a dial indicating direction doesn't tell you how far to move it. 2d motion needs 2 pieces of information, you're fundamentally not understanding that concept. your attempt to drop "polar coordinates" doesn't work either. polar coordinates (...being as how they represent a position in 2D...) are fundamentally 2 dimensions, direction and magnitude. it's like you're trying to go over everyone else's head by going over your own head.

Still all of this is ignoring the fact that the lens needs to be able to detect motion and properly compensate, and this needs to happen very fast. not at all the same as a focus or aperture motor where all the lens needs to do is respond to directions from the body to turn left or right (requiring no in-lens measurements, computation + compensation, or high speed).

LOL @ "high school science project". by your description of how they work, you've clearly never touched an electromagnetic actuator in your life let alone try to control one with any degree of precision. yet you seem to feel comfortable enough to proclaim it at such an accessible level for implementation! keep "prototyping" bro. i remember you dropping a "simple high school physics" reference in another thread. you were completely wrong there too.

I guess i've just seen you talk out your a$$ more than enough that i really can't take your threads seriously. some really come off as BS half-ass attempts at trying to flaunt your delusional grasp of all things (photographic and not). my gripe about IS/VR vs. aperture/focus motors may just seem like a specific digression in the overall thread, but in a way maybe it's not. I question the intent in posting up this "question" to begin with. It really doesn't seem like you actually care about finding out why manufacturers don't produce these types of lenses (there were actually plenty of valid reasons given...), it kinda comes off like you just wanted a soapbox to voice some carelessly thought through speculation.