Phototrend has been doing excellent interviews with executives at all the camera companies at CP+, and today they posted their interview with Nikon’s Keiji Oishi .
Slightly edited after translation: “[The Tamron and Sigma lenses] are produced under a Nikon license. These manufacturers can now propose lenses for the Z-mount.” Note the word “propose.” I’ve already noted in Theory #3 that third-party lens makers must submit a lens for licensing to Nikon, that it isn’t a blanket open mount situation. We still don’t have any verification of the most critical bit, though: whether Nikon is only allowing non-competing lenses but won’t license directly competing ones.
“Such collaborations with other Nikon-licensed manufacturers are very beneficial, especially for new users of the mount.” Aren’t we all new users to the mount? ;~) But I did note that Oishi-san spent a lot of time in the interview talking about the user view of the world. That’s good, because he’s head of the UX [user experience] team in the Imaging group.
I’ll let you read the full interview on the site that posted it, but I did have one more comment about the answers Oishi-san gave. In particular, the 26mm versus 28mm lens. The basic stated point was that the 26mm more tries to mimic what smartphones are doing for their main focal length. That, of course, implies that the 26mm was targeted at smartphone users.
But that only applies if we’re talking full frame. It’s a big leap from smartphone to full frame ILC. At list prices, even a Z5 with the 26mm is far more costly than the average user paid for their phone (and there are no subsidies from carriers). The Z5 is also a big difference in physical size, too.
When I first saw the 26mm pancake pop onto the Road Map, I wrote that it must have been produced with a particular camera in mind. I’m pretty sure that we haven’t yet seen that camera.
