Chinese lenses

[budjames]

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Just now, lct said:

That's what people used to say when Japanese products invaded Europe after WW2. I'm just an ugly lawyer you know and for me there is or there is no patent infringements, as simple as that. Hence my question. My feeling is there are no patent infringements by Chinese companies about optical designs like Sonnar's we were discussing about but i'm not specialized in this matter at all so i may be totally wrong .

I worked for a US manufacturer of commercial photographic and graphics arts processors in my previous career. Kodak was our dealer in Asia and many Middle East countries. During my visits to China, I saw firsthand how that would reverse engineer the parts used in our equipment and make the spare parts. The value of spare parts purchases during the service life of the equipment was about 15% of what we saw from developed countries. The Chinese would mold the many sizes of plastic gears used in the equipment (1,000s per machine) to make their own spare parts. They even copied the US patent numbers that were molded into every gear. They ripped us off for years.

Go to most city streets where vendors are selling knock offs of design bags which are all made in China. It's a hundreds of billions of dollars problem in the US. Not to mention the stealing of intellectual property via hacking and other nefarious means. Again hundreds of billions of dollars stolen.

And now, the Chinese are killing Americans with deadly fentanyl smuggled into our country through an open southern border. $150,000 dead Americans and counting in 18 months. Terrible!

Cheers,
Bud

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[budjames]

1 hour ago, Al Brown said:

Your home appliances, car parts, 99% of clothes you wear, most stuff you buy, your computer, your phone, pretty much everything in your life is Chinese made these days. Many companies are also "missing" where their product is made on their website or even intentionally hiding where their product is made to fool the buyers. Even for items "Made in Japan", the AC units and parts are all Made in China. It is unfortunately virtually impossible to live a comfortable and satisfying life (unless you are a true, fully dedicated hipster) without Chinese products. There is a small movement on the internet with acronym NMIC (Not Made In China), perhaps you can look there for inspiration.

Since the CCP owns many our politicians and mainstream news media, it will never stop. Globalist greed trumps all legitimate concerns.

Cheers,
Bud

[lct]

Sorry Bud, i respect your experience of course but i was referring to optical designs only.

[Chimichurri]

2 hours ago, jaapv said:

Unfortunately red edges have nothing to do with the camera but only with chromatic aberration of the lens. If you mean blue haloes around bright highlights, that is indeed sensor blooming, which we rarely see nowadays.

He’s talking about this issue here of uncoded lenses 

and it was resolved with proper coding and/or Adobe Flatfield correction. 

He just needs to say in every post that the M11 something something BSI something something BEST EVER! 😂

.. I like it. He does it in every post. It’s funny.

But yea… if using old uncoded lenses and you’re having these color drifts just use Adobe Flatfield.  

 

Edited November 13, 2022 by Chimichurri

[pgk]

5 hours ago, Al Brown said:

Your list is missing the Summicron-C 40/2 ☺️

And whatever happened to the Rapid Rectilinear? (Probably the most successful lens in the 19th century).

[lct]

2 minutes ago, Chimichurri said:

He’s talking about this issue here of uncoded lenses 

and it was resolved with proper coding and/or Adobe Flatfield correction. 

He just needs to say in every post that the M11 something something BSI something something BEST EVER! 😂

This is becoming ridiculous. Your tone remains me of some trolls we've been facing some time ago here but i hope to be wrong. AFAIC I have not waited for the M11 to use what you call the "BSI something". I do this since i got my Kolari mod A7r2 five years ago.

[pgk]

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45 minutes ago, lct said:

I'm just an ugly lawyer you know and for me there is or there is no patent infringements, as simple as that. Hence my question. My feeling is there are no patent infringements by Chinese companies about optical designs like Sonnar's we were discussing about but i'm not specialized in this matter at all so i may be totally wrong .

But should a patent holder want to enforce their intellectual rights (I would very much doubt that many are still held in terms of base lens design due to the age of these designs), then no doubt that would require a civil case which might well prove costly and then would require equally costly enforcement. Such a civil case would, I assume, have a ruling effective only within the jurisdiction of the court. There is a precendent because a European manufacturer has won a case regarding a tripod head design but, as far as I am aware, this only prevents the sale of the 'copy' in markets where this can be enforced which is in itself very difficult when customers can order via the internet dorect from the maker involved.

Getting back to Chinese lenses, as I have said before, the Chinese makers may have lower costs but skilled manufacturing and testing operatives are not cheap anywhere as they require specialist training. If a lens is cheap then there is a reason and the country/regime where is is produced is not hugely relevant. My own experince of cheap Chinese lenses is that they are fine stopped down but less so wide open, which is after all exactly what might be expected because achieving high quality at fast apertures requires good design and precise and exactibg construction, assembly and testing - the last two of which iare the expensive bits. Copying a les is one thing; copying its assembly and testing is quite another.

[jaapv]

37 minutes ago, Chimichurri said:

He’s talking about this issue here of uncoded lenses 

and it was resolved with proper coding and/or Adobe Flatfield correction. 

He just needs to say in every post that the M11 something something BSI something something BEST EVER! 😂

.. I like it. He does it in every post. It’s funny.

But yea… if using old uncoded lenses and you’re having these color drifts just use Adobe Flatfield.  

 

Ah-I misunderstood. Italian Flag 🤓That is partly a matter of lens alignment and microlenses

[lct]

1 hour ago, pgk said:

My own experince of cheap Chinese lenses is that they are fine stopped down but less so wide open, which is after all exactly what might be expected because achieving high quality at fast apertures requires good design and precise and exactibg construction, assembly and testing - the last two of which iare the expensive bits

Short but different experience here. The 7art 35/2 is tack sharp at f/2. It is not w/o flaws but sharpness is not an issue for it, at least in the centre of the frame. Here on digital CL at f/2. The lens has a sloped focus cam though, to reduce cost i guess, the same way as Leica did in the seventies for its "C" lenses for Leica film CL.

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[pgk]

13 minutes ago, lct said:

Short but different experience here. The 7art 35/2 is tack sharp at f/2. It is not w/o flaws but sharpness is not an issue for it, at least in the centre of the frame. Here on digital CL at f/2. The lens has a sloped focus cam though, to reduce cost i guess, the same way as Leica did in the seventies for its "C" lenses for Leica film CL.

Same lens I had. Mine was soft wide open which probably illustrates my point. The problem with lower assembly/testing costs is variance in QC  so some lenses will be fine. others may not be.

[rtai]

I don’t remember which lens is a 7Artisans or TTARTISAN. They need to do something about their brand names. Anyway I had a 50/1.1 purchased on a whim based on user reviews and it was impressive. If it was a Japanese niche brand made in someone’s basement it would have been an instant classic but it wasn’t because it was Chinese and came with all that political baggage nothing to do with optics, photography or people who made the products. I prefer Leica lenses and freely admit I am a snob. On the other hand I have grown to really like Voigtlander and think the latest releases are as good sort of Rolex vs Grand Seiko. 

[intangiblethings]

5 hours ago, budjames said:

I worked for a US manufacturer of commercial photographic and graphics arts processors in my previous career. Kodak was our dealer in Asia and many Middle East countries. During my visits to China, I saw firsthand how that would reverse engineer the parts used in our equipment and make the spare parts. The value of spare parts purchases during the service life of the equipment was about 15% of what we saw from developed countries. The Chinese would mold the many sizes of plastic gears used in the equipment (1,000s per machine) to make their own spare parts. They even copied the US patent numbers that were molded into every gear. They ripped us off for years.

Go to most city streets where vendors are selling knock offs of design bags which are all made in China. It's a hundreds of billions of dollars problem in the US. Not to mention the stealing of intellectual property via hacking and other nefarious means. Again hundreds of billions of dollars stolen.

And now, the Chinese are killing Americans with deadly fentanyl smuggled into our country through an open southern border. $150,000 dead Americans and counting in 18 months. Terrible!

Cheers,
Bud

Curious to hear your thoughts on this? 

https://apnews.com/article/north-america-us-news-ap-top-news-theft-international-news-b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88dc53

[pgk]

4 minutes ago, intangiblethings said:

Curious to hear your thoughts on this? 

Even within Britain IPO was fair game with Patent's granted, to those who could afford them, even when they were not the primary creators of the Patented item. This applied to photographic lenses too. I have a Grubb Patent Doublet which many would say was essentially the basis for the highly succesful Rapid Rectilinear lens which was itself patented by J H Dallmeyer, who did of course prosecute infringements. My lens though, was manufactured prior to Dallmeyer's patent and the whole business was a sore pont with Dallmeyer's son still defedning the patent being originated by his fathe at the turn of the century. All's fair in love and war, and apparently IPO rights too🤥.

[RexGig0]

If I have read the specifications correctly, at the Adorama site, there are no filter threads on the M-mount version of the TTArtisan 21mm f/1.4 lens. I found an indication at the B&H site that the another version of this lens, for another mount, uses 72mm filters, which require some kind of adapter. Well, that is a concern, because I use color filters when shooting monochrome images, plus, 72mm is a rather large filter, for a lens to be used on a rangefinder camera. My Voigtlander Nokton 21mm f/1.4 VM uses 62mm threaded filters. My Zeiss 21mm f/4.5 ZM uses 46mm filters. I do not often use an external viewfinder, to shoot at 21mm, so, want to be able to use the M camera’s viewfinder, and want to be able to focus with the rangefinder. I can see adequately to focus with the rangefinder, when using my VM and ZM 21mm lenses.

One reviewer described the hood as “wobbly,” though it might have been another mount’s version of this lens. My ZM and VM 21mm lenses have hoods that are quite stable, when affixed.

I do not think that I would enjoy this rather large TTArtisan 21mm lens, that would block much of the viewfinder. I would rather use a 21mm lens that can be my only lens for a day of walking-about.

 

 

 

 

[sometimesmaybe]

Wow, having just read through the thread I didn’t realise this was going to be such a hot potato 💥

I think we need to distinguish between ‘specific lenses’ made by Chinese manufacturers on the one hand and comments about ‘Chinese products generally’ and ‘China’ itself. I’m only here to talk about the former, as I don’t have enough braincells for the later 😅

I own the TTA 50mm f1.4 and the 7A 75mm f1.25. Speaking as a portrait shooter, I find the TTA to be a great ‘all round’ lens, but it’s just a touch on the large side. The 7A is my current 'go to' short tele, but it’s only really usable for me from f2.8 for a ‘dreamy’ type look. 
 
 

[rramesh]

There are many products made in China. Many of the top brands in the world make their products in China. Leica has several partnerships with Chinese manufacturers and many of their products in the past with partnership with Panasonic were made in China.

In any market, there are the good and the bad, and this is true of products made in most other countries.

Chinese lenses are good at the price point they are sold at. Sometimes as good as, or even better, than more expensive lenses e.g, 7Artisans, Lens Light Lab. 

As a buyer, the final decision is yours and yours alone, and you should not blame others for your poor decisions.

 

[jankap]

We need more brick walls, I assume.

Aren´t lenses be made to take pictures with them? Herefore I propose no brick walls as subjects.🤪

Edited November 14, 2022 by jankap

[jdlaing]

2 minutes ago, jankap said:

We need more brick walls, I assume.

 

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[AndreasG]

I had two Chinese lenses, the first was the 7A 1.1/50. It was useless at open aperture, just a nice paper weight, meanwhile I sold it. The second one was 7the A 2/35, which showed surprisingly good resolution and contrast, but also a strong pin cushion distortion and flare, I rarely use it and my interest in Chinese lenses is almost gone.

[satijntje]

I owned several ttartisan and 7artisans lenses, but have sold them all.

Better one Leica lens then 6 copies!

No more Chinese lenses in my house, for sure.