Nikon today pulled another lens off the road map, this time the 24mm f/1.7 DX.
The question a lot of people have is “why this lens now?” It doesn’t have VR, after all, making it less interesting for the current Z30, Z50, Zfc triplets. It leapfrogs the 200-600mm that has been on the road map far, far longer. So a lot of people are scratching their heads.
I’ll offer a simple explanation: simple lenses don’t tend to fall off the critical path to launch. There’s no rocket science in the 24mm f/1.7 DX, no new technologies, no elaborate mechanisms. From green lighting from R&D to production, this lens took no detours. It doesn’t have a lot of parts, and probably none that are currently still mired in supply chain issues.
The fact that the 24mm f/1.7 DX was launched at the end of May 2023 tells me that Nikon has always planned for it to be launched in that window. The question is why? Could it have been that Nikon originally intended to launch another DX camera in this time frame, but that camera development didn’t stick to its schedule? We’ve just had two DX lenses (the other being the 12-28mm f/3.5-5.6 VR DX) launched in a narrow time frame, after all.
Or is Nikon bridging two camera releases (Z30 and a future Z?0) with lenses to keep DX in people’s minds?
Or is it just release-when-ready in Nikon’s development teams now?
I’d vote for Nikon originally intending to make more of a DX punch this spring (at least two lenses, one camera). But it might just be release-when-ready in order to keep Nikon in the news as much as possible.
