sebjmatthews
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 p.2 #10 · Voigtlander Nokton 50mm f/1.0 announced for Canon RF mount | |
From what I've gathered, both in regards to Canon and how other manufacturers operate, is that the only 'wall' Canon has actually thrown up was in regards to Viltrox copy & pasting Canon's coding. That was actual theft, so Canon got the lawyers involved and shut it down.
Legally, there's nothing Canon can do to stop another company from reverse-engineering the various protocols and selling autofocus RF products. Many companies have made autofocus EF-RF adapters for years now, for example. If Canon actually tried to stop someone else from developing from scratch then courts all over the world, especially throughout Europe, would rake them over the coals. Anti-monopoly laws exist specifically to prevent companies from creating wholly closed ecosystems, and even larger companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Disney, have been unable to get around them.
The catch is that developing your own products to work on a new mount from scratch is a lot more expensive than coming to a working agreement with the manufacturer. This is what we saw with Fujifilm; Tamron and Sigma both said they wanted to get onto Fuji XF, but it was just too expensive for them to do it alone. They waited until Fuji were willing to sell them a license, which saved them a lot of money and allowed them to keep their prices down, compared to if they had had to figure everything out on their own.
Canon, I expect, are or have been doing the same thing as Fuji. They haven't actually blocked third-parties from developing for RF—again, except Viltrox, which was a different scenario—but they also haven't offered any help, either. And not offering those licensing deals is effectively the same as blocking third-parties, even if it isn't technically blocking. Third-parties could have developed for RF this whole time... it just wasn't financially viable. Also, Tamron are plenty busy making Sony lenses, and Sigma have had their hands full with the L-mount, so those two in particular were never going to rush to develop for RF, anyway. Why sink tens or even hundreds of millions into developing for RF when you can just keep turning over a profit with your current work while you wait for Canon to offer you a cheaper route?
Again, this is speculation based on years of following and at times being part of the industry. Obviously I am not a Canon executive and can not categorically say that this is what's happened. But it's what has happened with other companies, and everything around Canon RF lines up with it.
Anyway, I'm very keen to try this Voigtlander. I gave the ZY Mitakon 50mm f/0.95 III a shot on RF and quite liked it, but it's too heavy to balance well even on the R5, and the build quality was poor and it developed many problems in just a few months of use. I would trust that Voigtlander would put the thing together much better, and it's about 100g lighter, which isn't quite as much as I'd like, but better than nothing. Every Voigtlander lens I've ever used has always impressed me with its colour rendition, too, even if the contrast is quite often lacking.
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