Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while have probably figured out that I have a catholic attitude towards lens selection. Yesterday on DPR there was an opportunity for me to bloviate on the subject. Here’s what I had to say to someone who wanted to use only one brand of lens on his current Nikon and his prospective a7RII in order to ensure consistency.:
Do you shoot video and want to intercut shots from different lenses without grading? Or do you just use the OOC JPEGs without editing?
Those are the only reasons that I can think of to limit oneself to one lens brand, and even that won’t work unless you have a lens of lenses specifically engineered for the same color look, like sets of cinema lenses.
Absent that, remember that all lenses have a look to them, and different designs have different looks, even from the same company. Also, color differences among lenses can be corrected easily in post.
By not using Zeiss lenses on your Nikon bodies, you’re giving up some lenses that greatly outperform their Nikon equivalents. But, if you move to the Sony world, the universe of excellent lenses open to you is much larger. It would be a shame if you closed yourself off to that.
You can use your Nikon lenses on the a7x, but the G ones currently suffer from imprecise diaphragm control (look for that to change soon).
- You can use F-mount Zeiss and Sigma lenses.
- You can use Canon lenses with AF support.
- You can use Batis, Loxia, Sigma and other E-mount lenses.
- You can use Leica M, Leica R, Pentax, Contax, and a whole host of legacy lenses.
It is unlikely — verging on impossible — that every lens in one vendor’s line will be the best lens of its type regardless of vendor. By restricting yourself to one vendor, you are cutting yourself off from choosing the best tools to do your photography.
John Denver wrote a song called Berkeley Woman, which ends with the line: “I’d no more love just one kind of woman than drink only one kind of wine.” I don’t think that way about women, but I certainly do about lenses.
So you suggest Nikon to ditch its legacy mount for its upcoming mirrorless? 😉
in their point of view, making you able to buy other brand lenses, makes no money for them. Sony could take this risk, because they had no choice.
A couple of decades ago, you only bought F-mount glass from someone besides Nikon if you were looking for a cheaper alternative and were willing to give up quality. Those days are gone. Both Sigma and Zeiss often deliver F-mount lenses that outperform those of similar focal length from Nikon, and, in the case of Zeiss, may cost more.
So Nikon already has competition for lens sales.
I wouldn’t presume to tell them what to do when and if they make a full frame mirrorless camera, but staying with the F-mount would mean they’re only putting one toe in the water. They’re kind of damned if they do and damned if they don’t, though. Can you imagine the uproar from current Nikon owners if there’s a new lens mount, even if there is — and there would have to be — an adapter for F-mount lenses.
Jim
Its a real problem for Nikon and Canon.
In principle, an adapter solution would work as well as a native mirrorless mount that has the same flange distance as the current one. If it’s well engineered, the rest is down to the firmware and the camera’s focussing abilities. The new lenses designed for mirrorless will likely focus better either way.
But an adapter would make it seem as though existing users were second class, even if they aren’t. And would downgrade the commercial significance of the back catalogue of EF or F mount glass, which is Canikon’s big commercial advantage. Even if it shouldn’t downgrade it, and even if a lot of that older glass is not so great (good though it is)
But go the long flage distance route like Sigma have done, and you rule out some truly compact designed for mirrorless lenses, especially at the wide end, and reduce the flexibility of lens designers to design for whatever distance to sensor best suits the lens. Plus you rule out the possibility of creating a larger mount diameter short distance mount, which might have some small real benefits, and which could be touted as having major ones viz-a-viz Sony.