I get it: certain prime lens specifications are very low-hanging fruit for someone wanting to get into the optics game. 35mm, 50mm, 85mm even at f/1.4 are all simple enough that I believe that even I could design a pretty good lens from scratch these days. Moreover, the basic glass sources needed are readily available and expanding, so the biggest problem really is just reverse engineering the camera’s focus/exposure communications and gearing up manufacturing. Neither of those seem all that difficult, either.
And, of course, they aren’t. That’s pretty much proven by well more than a dozen Chinese purveyors of said optics that have become prevalent in the last few years. In almost every mount I check, Chinese prime lenses more than double the number of lenses that are available. My list of Chinese prime lenses now numbers into the many hundreds. But these tend to be in a limited set of focal lengths, pretty much all primes, with a strong concentration in the 35mm, 50mm, and 85mm lengths.
I have to wonder if there’s enough there there for all these companies to survive. I mean, if everyone bought just one Chinese prime lens for their new camera, that would only be a total of about 6m units total a year. At an average selling cost of just over US$100, that’s only a US$600m market to share between 15+ companies (20+ if we include the Japanese makers). Of course US$40m a year for a new, entrepreneurial company sounds like a lot when you start from US$0. But I don’t think it’s sustainable, and I’m being generous here in how many people will actually buy such lenses.
The other problem with lenses is that once you have a competent, fast aperture prime in your desired focal length, are you going to later buy another?
The camera companies have been wading through this issue, themselves. Lenses got really good in the late teens, so anyone that has recent lenses has really good lenses. And once they buy out a “set” their continued buying tends to fall off. That’s why new configurations (originally 16-35mm but these days everything from f/2 zooms to new focal length choices) have gotten attention. People keep asking me why Nikon didn’t come out with a 500mm f/5.6 PF VR S for the Z-mount. Well, they’ve sold almost 40,000 for the F-mount, and you can use them on a Z System camera with an FTZ adapter, so exactly how many of those folk are going to pony up thousands of dollars just to get rid of the adapter?
Meanwhile, one reason why we have f/1.2 Nikkors now is a bit of an attempt to get those holding onto older f/1.4 lenses to "upgrade."
The real problem comes down to market stability. When something completely new appears that has a compelling advantage (e.g. DSLRs at the turn of the century), two things combine to create real market growth: (1) replacement actions; and (2) new buying interest. The replacement action triggered by DSLRs was people moving from film to digital. The new buying interest was that a number of perceived hurdles with mastering cameras were removed, so more people gravitated to them. Broadly speaking, this doubled the market for ILC. Growth. Consistent and impressive growth for a decade.
The same thing didn't happen with mirrorless. That's because of replacement frictions (poor EVF versus good optical viewfinder, for instance). Moreover, the actual photos of DSLRs still hold up today, meaning less need to update. We see this particularly with D850 users, for instance. I don't judge a D850 image to be any worse than a Z8 image. This means that other things have to trigger the replacement, and those other things aren't nearly as compelling as the film-to-digital shift was. Meanwhile, some new buying interest actually went to smartphones as mirrorless got foothold.
The result is this: over the course of a decade, mirrorless went from 3.96m units to 4.83m units (and some of the latter number is really delayed buying due to two very down years triggered by the pandemic coupled with the continued demise of DSLR sales.
Best case, mirrorless can probably achieve somewhere in the 5-6m unit range a year, but will find itself on a plateau very soon.
I've met a few people at companies in Tokyo who track this sort of thing. I also know that when they report "plateau" the companies shift in some way to try to figure out how to better their monetary positions. That comes in a few ways: (a) cost cutting; (b) product category shifts; (c) accessories; (d) emphasizing higher priced products; and sometimes (e) new halo products (which are also higher priced).
The Japanese companies have finally figured out that they completely abandoned compact cameras a little too quickly. That's a category shift they can (re-)exploit. Sony's A9 Mark III with its global shutter was an attempt at "new halo," but after a very brief sales bump, it's no longer providing that. Emphasizing the higher priced products has pretty much run its course now; you can't keep going to the well with that one.
Which brings us to accessories (which includes lenses). Nikon had this grand plan—and even shared their goal with the financial community—that they'd achieve two lenses sold for every camera in the Z System. Didn't happen. Not going to happen. And now with the Chinese producing more lens choices for the Z mount than Nikon, even the current level of lens sales will be challenged.
Cameras (and lenses) are feeling like a broken market again, with a fairly close ceiling that won't be penetrated (e.g. 6m ILC units/year).
We're finally about to hear about some new products because CP+, the biggest camera show in Japan, happens at the end of February. Pretty much all the Japanese companies like to launch something when they have their home market's attention. I'm writing this in mid-January prior to getting NDA (non-disclosure agreement) information so that I can state my expectations, not what I know will happen (yes, I write most of my articles far in advance of them appearing, partly because I need time to revise and edit them*). Basically, I suspect CP+ will be relatively boring in terms of new cameras, with perhaps some shift towards new compacts. The least-boring bit of the CP+ product announcements will likely be on the lens side, because the Japanese now have that Chinese competition to deal with, and there are plenty of niche-y lenses that can attract attention from all those 35 to 85mm primes. But still, I'm not convinced we need a lot of new lenses, and particularly not primes in the mid-range.
We'll see soon if I'm right.
Late update: what I'm hearing from US dealers about January sales is pretty bleak. I don't think anyone's beating last year's sales numbers. That predicts something else: other than Canon, whose fiscal year is over, the rest of Japanese camera companies are trying to figure out how to meet their stated year-end goals before the March 31st closing date comes racing up on them. I expect stronger rebates/discounts in the US, probably with more bundle offers, but given our new administration and the threat of tariffs and the chaos that might create, this could get tricky. Hopefully, everyone's stocked up their US subsidiaries already with what needs to be sold between now and April 1st.
*This article was started on 12/30/2024, mostly finished by 1/14/2024, then edited in the last week of January.
