We’re now seeing official legal boilerplate on third-party Z-mount lenses (“This product is developed and manufactured under the license agreement with Nikon Corporation”).
In the DSLR world, we did not see such legalese, and the general consensus was that Sigma, Tamron, and Tokina were reverse engineering the F-mount. What that led to was a repeating loop: (1) Nikon would release a new camera; (2) some third-party lenses would fail at something with the new camera; and (3) the third-party would sometimes issue firmware that fixed the problem.
The problem with all that comes in the words “fail” and “sometimes”. I tracked a lot of clear failures. I noted fewer fixes.
The failures were all over the board. Rarely did a third-party lens just completely stop working. More typically something like VR wouldn’t work as expected (either wouldn’t turn off or wouldn’t turn on), or some autofocus function was impacted. Many of the issues were subtle or not immediately evident. However, the problem rose up often enough that I stopped buying third-party lenses unless there was no clear Nikon alternative.
Now that the third-parties are licensing the mount, has everything changed? If a new Z body comes along and something breaks in a third-party lens, what’s going to happen? Which brings me to the headline: as part of the licensing agreement is there (a) an ongoing full disclosure by Nikon of the mount protocols; or (b) a liaison who can help the third-party figure out what changed and how they might address that? Moreover, when Nikon does something—still not documented—like Synchro VR on a new camera, is that information communicated to the third party lens licensees?
Remember, a Nikon executive is now on record as saying “We believe that [licensing the mount] brings real value to our customers, and we will continue doing this…we believe that it is beneficial that our customers have a greater variety of lenses available to them.” It’s really only of value to customers if those lenses keep working when new cameras come out, with all new performance and feature benefits.
Thus, I’m curious as to how the mount license relationship really works. If, as my sources suggest, that the process is that the third party makers submit each individual lens for licensing, does that mean that those lenses will track with future Nikon cameras? And can we assume that any non-licensed lenses won’t?
Will there even be non-licensed autofocus ones? Obviously, there could be, because the FTZ adapter shows that old F-mount communications can be understood by the cameras.
I really don’t see what all the secrecy is about. The only reason for secrecy is that there is more to the situation than the generic “third parties can now make Z-mount lenses.” So what is that? How does it work? How do we customers get benefit from this secret process?
Update Additional questions: will licensed lenses get firmware updates via the body's SETUP > Firmware option, or will Sigma and Tamron have to create a Z-mount dock? Does licensing include abilities like Synchro VR?
