When I first started shooting photographs and getting into camera gear, the way of the world is that you often bought a camera and first-party lenses. The third-party stuff just wasn’t all that good in terms of performance overall. Then the third-party Japanese lenses started to become better a bit over a decade ago. The Korean products got better right after that. And after the pandemic, the Chinese lenses all become very top-tier. It made me put a whole lot of things into perspective. But most of all, I’ve realized just how much we’re all overpaying for lenses from the big Japanese companies.
Let’s think about it: if a Chinese-made 50mm f1.4 performs as well as a Canon L or Sony G Master lens, then why do we need the Japanese option? Many of us will probably say it’s due to the autofocus performance or the image quality. But pixel-peeping is an imperialist capitalist concept made by boomers that doesn’t matter anymore when you look at the whole image. In fact, pixel-peeping was mostly an issue due to digital photography.
Instead, the price of Chinese lenses is often more so the price of the actual products.
Last month, I bought a Nikon D850 and then I looked around for a lens with autofocus and weather sealing to use with it. I settled on the Nikon 28mm f1.8 G. Of course, I bought all the gear used to get it at a better price for me. But I noticed that the lens was made in China. Let’s be frank here, brands like to tout that the Japanese products are superior — and often they’re really not. They’re just as good as the Chinese-made products. And if they aren’t, it’s because they’re choosing to make it such.
So what does this all mean? This further sharpens the point that I’ve been trying to drive home to photographers for so long. We don’t need to buy brand-new used gear, and we’re all getting massively ripped off by an industry that has forgotten all about photographers. Instead, they want us all to make stuff for social media, which gives it to AI and makes us obsolete.
If the quality is the same, then why would I spend more money on the product? Folks tend to say the same thing about owning a Leica. They make the point that for the money, you’re getting more technology from a Canon, Nikon, or Sony camera. But what Leica gives you instead is build quality, a repair warranty that far outlives the camera’s usage and sales on the market, and it’s giving you exactly what you need to shoot good photographs without outsourcing all the brain power to AI and automation.
Photographers: the idea of an insert-brand-name-here family (like a Sony family) was always a sham.