Evolution of Chinese Lens and Accessories Makers

3 Apr

Written By MJ

In recent times there have been plenty of releases of lenses and camera accessories from Chinese manufacturers, and truth be told I am impressed with the rate that they are improving their products and innovating.

I strongly believe that healthy competition would bring about improvements and innovations, so with the rise of Chinese lens manufacturers, I think that us as consumers would benefit as a whole since the entire industry would be competing with each other to bring out more original and interesting products.

There have been several reputable camera accessories brands from China from a while back, such as Godox’s lighting accessories and triggers, Smallrig’s L-brackets and cages, and DJI’s drone systems, just to name a few. However, when we think about lenses, the initial releases of camera lenses from China were, blatantly speaking, clones of older lens designs, and tended to be only manual focus only. Most of the time they were just not up to current standards - usually thought of as cheap lenses to play around with, and could pretty much only take decent images once stopped down to around f/5.6 or so (and even so their performance is still just decent at best).

Fast forward to today, and we can see lenses from several Chinese manufacturers which incorporate modern AF systems tuned for use with mirrorless cameras, and some manufacturers also come up with their original optical designs and innovations (such as incorporating USB ports directly in the lens to facilitate firmware updates) - which is a far cry from the past where they were simply replicating old optical designs. Many of these manufacturers also do tend to cater to a certain niche - some examples include TTArtisan and 7Artisans catering to the general crowd with good price-performance lenses; Laowa (previously Venus Optics) with their probes, high magnification macro lenses and low-distortion ultra wide-angle lenses; Viltrox with product lines catering to compact sizes (Air series) or high performance lenses (Pro and Lab series).

That said, the fast rate of iteration does have certain consequences - namely with so many models flooding the market with similar nomenclatures, it is often quite confusing and difficult to determine if a particular model is the latest design or one from a previous generation, and due to that their resale value do not hold well too since a newer model is always just round the corner. Combined, these make a purchase from a Chinese manufacturer still a sort of a small gamble, even if they are pretty reputable.

However, credit should be given where credit is due, and the fact that they are improving so fast and bringing so much more value to the photography community as a whole is definitely worth commending.

Right now, there are still certain drawbacks from getting lenses from Chinese manufacturers, namely:

The coatings used on their lenses are still pretty simple and do not always eliminate flares and ghosts, even in simple backlit situations.
Quality control is not as stringent, and as such there are quite a bit of sample variance (although this has been improved recently according to most users, but still not up to par as the more established lens manufacturers)
They still do not have a proper track record on their build quality and long-term reliability, especially for the newer offerings with autofocus mechanisms (which is a given since they just entered the autofocus playing field pretty recently).
AF algorithms are reverse-engineered so firmware updates are required for compatibility with newer bodies. However it is hard to predict when support or firmware development would stop for current products.
Customer service is pretty much non-existent according to most users; if you buy from a reputable store they might handle the returns/warranty issues for you, but chances are if you need repairs it might take a long turnaround since they do not have regional repair offices.
Similarly there is no pro-support for their lenses, and thus the risk is too high for working photographers should the lens malfunction.

These drawbacks, especially that on the lack of support, are the main reasons why I have not personally purchased and owned lenses from the Chinese manufacturers, even though some of them are really intriguing to me (like the recently released Viltrox 135/1.8 LAB).

But I think that as these manufacturers grow and improve their reputation, they would start addressing these shortcomings as a way to distinguish themselves from the less reputable brands, and in my opinion that would be the start of a new era of reliable high performance lenses from them.

I have used third party lenses in the past for the F-mount (various lenses from Sigma, Tamron and Samyang), and am still using one now as a workhorse lens on the Z-mount (the Tamron 35-150/2-2.8 Z). It is definitely great to have more options on the table if the lenses from Chinese manufacturers prove to have reliable build quality and start to have proper support for them.

As mentioned earlier in this post, I do believe the rising of the Chinese lens manufacturers would spur healthy competition amongst the other manufacturers too, so I am certainly looking forward to how this industry would shape up in the coming years.