Sony's amazing cameras

The 18-55 kit lens is a pretty solid lens, optically. The 16-50 power zoom kit lens is apparently not quite as nice, but I mean, look at the size of that thing. You are definitely sacrificing quality for size there.

Early days… I suppose you’re right, the E-mount was only introduced in 2010. But Sony is notorious for over-pricing their gear, in general, because they can.

I feel like you’re addressing a lot of points that have nothing to do with my post. For instance, price was only with regards to how the A7/A7R is being pushed at consumers vs. the lenses that they’ve promised for it. (You will note that I agree that they’ve made some very nice quality lenses. At the same time, and this is just speculation on my part, I expect that the A-mount is not likely to last much longer, particularly the full-frame A-mount.)

That said, I will admit that 4 mount variations is a bit misleading in that you can use the crop lenses on full-frame bodies, and vice versa. At the same time, if you’ve bought a full frame camera, spending money on new crop lenses is more than a bit of a waste, and the same goes in reverse. (It’s always, regardless of manufacturer, been less of “it’s the same mount” and more “you didn’t completely waste your money on those lenses for our previous camera”.)

Finally, adapters have little to nothing to do with Sony’s lens strategy, especially third-party ones for other manufacturers’ mounts. (It’s all well and good you can use other lenses on an A7/A7R – if I had more wide-angle m42 lenses I’d seriously consider it – but given the standard strategy has been to sell the bodies cheap and make the money on lenses, it doesn’t really help Sony or their lenses.)

Not sure with the DX series lenses, but when they made lenses for film-based APS cameras some lenses were designed so they wouldn’t mount on full-frame 35mm cameras. The reason was not merely to avoid vignetting, but because the rear elements protruded far enough into the mirror box that a 35mm mirror could potentially collide with the lens. I imagine (and hope) that the same concern exists with DX lenses, as building unnecessary mirror clearance complicates lens designs (making them more retrofocus than they need to be).

Using a pronea lens on a d700 It requires surgery.

The DX lenses don’t project into the mirror box.

ix lens

dx lens

I hope you can see the difference.
The row of contacts fits just inside the lens mount.

I’m sorry if you think I was addressing points you didn’t make but I felt that (accidentally or otherwise) you gave a misleading impression of the state of play with Sony cameras lens wise and I wanted to correct that impression.

On the APS-C lens thing, it seems to me that rhere are a lot of cynics in the world and for my money, the making of them by Sony or Nikon or Canon is less about trying to rip people off than being able to manufacture cheap lenses for the vast majority who have APS-C sensors. I don’t really see this as a problem as essentially they’d be wasting the full frame part of the lens which their cameras can’t even see.

On m42, there are very few decent wide angle m42 lenses unfortunately as they were difficult to make back in the day. There are some marvelous lenses from 35mm and up though. m42 isn’t the entire story in any case. You can mount pretty much anything on an e-mount camera from Leitz to Nikon to Canon to Zeiss Contax, Minolta MD etc etc. Regardless of whether it’s Sony’s strategy or not that this is to do with, it’s the case and having a cheap (relatively at least) body you can pretty much mount any lens on is a cause for celebration in my book.

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