Is the Sony E mount restricting....

[Swissblad]

.... the development of more advanced 3rd party mirrorless lenses?

I just watched an interesting review of the Nikon & Tamron 28-75mm f2.8 lenses, where the question was raised whether the "smaller size" of the Sony E-mount was restricting the development of more optimal or advanced 3rd party lenses for the larger Nikon Z or Leica L mount ie. Sigma lenses for the L mount are constrained by being designed in parallel for Sony, rather than being natively designed for the L mount.

Curious as to your views.

 

[pegelli]

I think it's FUD, people suffer most from the suffering they fear.

The GM 50/1.2 gets very good reviews and there's an 85/1.2 rumoured, so I don't think a 2.8 zoom is restricted my a slightly smaller mount size, and E-mount is still bigger than the Leica M-mount which, in my mind, is still not restricting making many absolute stellar lenses.

Yes, theoretically a bigger mount might have more degrees of freedom in the design but I doubt it makes a very big difference in practical terms looking at what's already produced for E-mount.

 

[RobbieAB]

Theoretically, yes, the Z and RF mounts will be less constrained for the optical designers. How much this matters for third party lens makers is a different question.

What is perhaps more interesting is to look at what Canon and Nikon are doing for their mounts, and asking “Why are we only seeing this now, and never for DSLR?”.

 

[existenceproduct]

I think it's FUD, people suffer most from the suffering they fear.

The GM 50/1.2 gets very good reviews and there's an 85/1.2 rumoured, so I don't think a 2.8 zoom is restricted my a slightly smaller mount size, and E-mount is still bigger than the Leica M-mount which, in my mind, is still not restricting making many absolute stellar lenses.

Yes, theoretically a bigger mount might have more degrees of freedom in the design but I doubt it makes a very big difference in practical terms looking at what's already produced for E-mount.




https://fotoprofy.com/sony-fe-vs-e-lenses/

So after seeing the debut of the Tamron 150-500 I just want to share some of my experience with the 3rd party lenses.

I tried a lot of them including Tamron 70-180 and Sigma 100-400. Unfortunately the AF is never as good as a Sony lens. My feeling is that it's not Tamron/Sigma using lame motors but rather Sony didn't tell them everything about the protocol. They are very fast for a single shot but fall apart when you're tracking something fast in the burst mode. Sony did restrict 3rd party lenses's burst rate on A9/A1 so I wouldn't be too surprised if that's indeed the case.

It's generally OK for everyday uses. When my boy is running around the performance drops quite a bit compared to a Sony lens but you can still get a lot of nice photos so I'm OK with my Tamron 17-28 and Sigma 56F1.4. But when things get serious, e.g. birds in flight, both the Tamron 70-180 and the Sigma 100-400 are extremely frustrating. Nowhere near the performance of a Sony 100-400GM which can easily handle the situation.

Funny thing is that Sigma 100-400 can't even detect the tripod. The image just drifts due to the Earth's rotation. The body should be able to provide such information (which is the case for Sony lenses) but clearly Sigma didn't get the memo. So yeah my tin foil hat tells me there is something wrong here. What I'm afraid of is that we may never get a 3rd party cheap telephoto lens that's truly capable..

 

[pegelli]

What I'm afraid of is that we may never get a 3rd party cheap telephoto lens that's truly capable..

A couple of remarks

• This thread was more about the size of the E-mount vs. the Z and RF mounts, not so much about how different manufacturers lenses perform (optically or other) on E-mount
• If your definition of "truly capable" is mainly determined AF tracking maybe you're right that Sigma and Tamron are less performant then the Sony lenses (I wouldn't know, on my old A7Rii tracking isn't latest/best-of-class anyway). But there are also many photographers (like me) who don't or hardly use tracking. For landscape, architecture and many other kinds of photography AF tracking is a non-issue.
• Optically the Tamron and Sigma telephoto's leave little to be desired vs. their Sony equivalents

A friend of mine owns an A1 and Sony 100-400 so maybe we should test my Tamron 150-500 on his body and his 100-400 on my A7Rii to compare tracking and see if it's more camera or lens dependent.

 

[Jorgen Udvang]

This is probably less of a problem with Sony's own lenses, since Sony can compensate for some of the disadvantage by in-camera processing, like they do with focus breathing. Due to computer assisted lens design, the problem is probably smaller than it was for Nikon back in the day. At least according to legend, the narrow F-mount was the reason why there was no AF 50mm f/1.2 and no 85mm f/1.2 at all. It was also said that the F-mount was a reason why Nikon initially didn't launch a full frame DSLR. There may have been other reasons for that though, since full frame sensors didn't exactly grow on trees, and since Canon made the first one that was universally usable.