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For those who haven't followed the camera world for a while, at this point a lens for a mirrorless camera will have a USB-C port to receive firmware updates. T

For those who haven't followed the camera world for a while, at this point a lens for a mirrorless camera will have a USB-C port to receive firmware updates. Tamron lenses for instance will allow a wired control or a wireless dongle to communicate with an app/computer and change the lens behavior, switch what the physical buttons and rings do. Potentially you can manage stepping through settings for stop motion like effects, time lapses or stacking. We're far from the days a lens was just metal and glass※. There are obvious downsides, but in practice it's actually a huge stepup IMHO. Every photographer is different and does different things, being able to fully adjust your gear is a godsend, especially as we need speed and reactivity. ※ there are still plenty, and plenty more will be designed and produced anew, but I don't think it's the major trend.

Kirby64 4mo ago
> For those who haven't followed the camera world for a while, at this point a lens for a mirrorless camera will have a USB-C port to receive firmware updates. Besides the slightly interesting stuff Tamron is doing, why on earth would I want firmware updates for a lens? Also, this seems like it would be much more readily accomplished by the camera itself… if you’re doing weird stop motion racking and whatnot, why would you rely on the camera and lens being separate? Seems like kind of a pain to me.
- clnhlzmn 4mo ago
  Because to control the autofocus motor and other features it makes sense to have a microcontroller in the lens. If you have a microcontroller in the lens you have software in the lens and if you have software in the lens you're going to need to update it. You could argue that the camera should do firmware updates but the manufacturers for (semi) open mounts like the ones Tamron is making lenses for don't want to have to design a protocol to do updates for third party lenses through the body when the lens manufacturer can just slap a USB port on the lens and call it a day. The port is also useful for customizing the lens functions. For third party lenses the camera can't be expected to manage those functions.
  - kamranjon 4mo ago
    There have been plenty of motorized lenses in the past that relied on the micro-contoller inside the camera body for control. What does having the controller live on the lens permit that the pattern we've used for years doesn't afford?
    - Gigachad 4mo ago
      You don’t _have_ to update lenses. The updates pretty much just fix edge case autofocus issues usually with specific cameras and settings. Before update mechanisms you just had to deal with it or buy a new lens.
  - Kirby64 4mo ago
    > If you have a microcontroller in the lens you have software in the lens and if you have software in the lens you're going to need to update it. No, no you shouldn’t. There’s no reason why a microcontroller should ever need its firmware updated. The only reason why you would need to update the firmware is to add features, which I guess is mildly interesting for the tamron, but like I said… you could handle all extra fancy focusing things in the camera body itself. Just give me a dumb lens that does exactly what the body tells it to do.
    - formerly_proven 4mo ago
      Most third party lenses reverse-engineer the AF protocol. They're going to need updates.
    - makeitdouble 4mo ago
      > Just give me a dumb lens that does exactly what the body tells it to do. It's hard to convey, but for instance you can reverse the fo us ring rotation, which probably only resonates with people who had to deal with it daily. Or you can adjust the ring travel. Or make the focus ring work as an aperture ring instead. Or straight disable annoying buttons. Up until now you'd have to go hunt the perfect lens where the maker was 100% on board with your preferences. Or adjust your whole shooting style to every gear you use. Sure a camera body could handle every single settings of third party lenses. But given what we've seen these 2 last decades, I don't think there was any chance of that happening. Tamron is partly Sony owned and they still did it on their own.
- makeitdouble 4mo ago
  The lens is communicating with the camera body, and you might want to adjust for newer bodies supporting more things for instance. I'm not aware of what exactly is changing, but I've already seen it happen with newer Sony bodies getting released, and an update going to Viltrox lenses to fully support thems. On the camera and lens being separate...in an ideal world you could ask the camera to do absolutely everything. In practice that's a tough order for a single company. The bright side is also that you can use a mildly older body while benefiting from a very flexible lens, or have different profiles for different lenses and not have the body care about which lens needs what. I can't imagine Nikon be bothered to properly operate a software ecosystem TBH.
- BarkMore 4mo ago
  > why on earth would I want firmware updates for a lens? One reason is to update the lens to work with new camera or new camera firmware.
- FireBeyond 4mo ago
  > Besides the slightly interesting stuff Tamron is doing, why on earth would I want firmware updates for a lens? Improved algorithms for focus hunting, diminishing chromatic aberration (most of it is in the glass but some positioning can tweak it). I get it, there's not a lot that will happen there, but some of that stuff will be useful on an investment that can easily be several thousand (I don't get into the wildlife telephotos, but two of my lenses were $3,300 or so - RF 85/1.2 and RF 28-70/2).
- jeswin 4mo ago
  Lenses are only tested on bodies which are available at the time of manufacture. They might focus hunt on newer bodies, because of tweaks to AF algorithms (for example, the speed at which instructions are transmitted). Sometimes in ways that can potentially cause damage long term.
entropie 4mo ago
> For those who haven't followed the camera world for a while, at this point a lens for a mirrorless camera will have a USB-C port to receive firmware updates. Iam not sure if this is a general truth. I recently bought a canon rf 24-70 f/2.8 which is pretty SOTA and it does not have an USBC port.
- CarVac 4mo ago
  Third party lenses that cannot be updated by the camera body will include a USB port.
  - dylan604 4mo ago
    Why would this be a good idea to break away from the norm of what has been done before? The mechanism of updating the lens through the camera exists. Why reinvent the wheel? It only increases the BOM for the lens to include the USB and the electronics involved.
    - CobaltFire 4mo ago
      Because third party lenses cannot leverage the camera body to update. Sigma has a dock that allows updates to their lenses in this fashion however.
      - mahmoudhossam 4mo ago
        Only for their old "Art" lenses, the modern "Contemporary" lenses can leverage the camera body update mechanism and only need a file on the SD card containing the firmware update.
        Sharlin 4mo ago
        "Contemporary" lenses aren’t more modern that "Art". The monikers were introduced at the same time, along with "Sports". Rather, "Art" is Sigma’s high-end line, similar to Canon’s "L". "Contemporary" on the other hand is a somewhat euphemistic term for "consumer" or "affordable".
josephg 4mo ago
This is only true for photography. For some reason, cinema lenses are still - for the most part - purely mechanical. For film and TV, most camera operators still focus manually - often via gears attached externally to the lens. Coming from modern photography, manual focusing is inconvenient and difficult to learn. But there's something very old-school cool about cine lenses. They feel great.
- pastel8739 4mo ago
  I think in cine it’s a lot more important to have smooth focus and to be able to control the focus speed, hence the MF lenses
  - aeturnum 4mo ago
    I also think cine lenses have the budget to continue making high quality mechanical interfaces. Consumer lenses must have AF and so are incentivized to reuse that functionality if it would reduce the BoM.
    - josephg 4mo ago
      Hm, I'm not sure about that. I suspect autofocus motors are much more expensive to manufacture than mechanical lens throws. They're almost certainly more expensive to design. I don't know about other manufacturers, but recent sony lenses contain 4 autofocus motors, and they can snap autofocus in tens-to-hundreds of milliseconds depending on the distance. Where do they even put those motors in the lens housing? Its probably a scale thing. Photography lenses make up for the design, engineering and manufacturing costs with scale. Everyone who takes photos needs lenses. But far fewer films are made, and cine lenses are often rented. So they really can't be manufacturing that many units in total. I suspect they don't manufacture cine lenses in high enough volume to justify the engineering costs of fitting complex microcontrollers and motors into the lens housing. And if the production can afford to hire a focus puller anyway, autofocus just isn't that valuable.
  - salvagedcircuit 4mo ago
    A large focus throw and more importantly, focus consistency, is paramount for cinema lenses. When you rack focus, the lens needs to show the same field of view every time, no questions asked. The early red pro cinema lenses had a design flaw where the focus rings would come loose over time and ruin shots. Someone clearly forgot the threadlocker.
jeswin 4mo ago
> at this point a lens for a mirrorless camera will have a USB-C port Ideally, camera bodies should support firmware updates via the body in a non-discriminatory way, but until then I wish manufacturers support firmware updates via USB-C. Looking at you Samyang Lens Station. I think users have been sufficiently upset, and they're adding USB-C to newer lenses.
dofm 4mo ago
I would contend that if you were to pick a trend line in the last ten, twelve years it is actually the return of high quality, cutting edge manual focus lenses for stills photography, which was a negligible market by 2014. Mirrorless has restored the utility of manual focus lenses in such a dramatic way that many of the significant advances in optical quality at every price point are happening in manual focus, and there is a real return to the understanding of the value of lens "character". Time will tell how much of this is a stepping-stone to Chinese manufacturers moving to AF lenses (which is definitely a part of it) but many of the best new lens designs are coming from the likes of Cosina-Voigtländer and various cinema-adjacent stills brands.
- Forgeties79 4mo ago
  Rokinon nailed their timing in particular in the 2010’s
  - dofm 4mo ago
    LK Samyang, yeah, doing some great stuff. They also make some (all, maybe?) of the native lenses for the Cambo Actus, which is another mirrorless era winner.
grishka 4mo ago
> USB-C port to receive firmware updates. So do you mean that even camera lenses now ship unfinished?

Kirby64 4mo ago

> For those who haven't followed the camera world for a while, at this point a lens for a mirrorless camera will have a USB-C port to receive firmware updates. Besides the slightly interesting stuff Tamron is doing, why on earth would I want firmware updates for a lens? Also, this seems like it would be much more readily accomplished by the camera itself… if you’re doing weird stop motion racking and whatnot, why would you rely on the camera and lens being separate? Seems like kind of a pain to me.

clnhlzmn 4mo ago
Because to control the autofocus motor and other features it makes sense to have a microcontroller in the lens. If you have a microcontroller in the lens you have software in the lens and if you have software in the lens you're going to need to update it. You could argue that the camera should do firmware updates but the manufacturers for (semi) open mounts like the ones Tamron is making lenses for don't want to have to design a protocol to do updates for third party lenses through the body when the lens manufacturer can just slap a USB port on the lens and call it a day. The port is also useful for customizing the lens functions. For third party lenses the camera can't be expected to manage those functions.
- kamranjon 4mo ago
  There have been plenty of motorized lenses in the past that relied on the micro-contoller inside the camera body for control. What does having the controller live on the lens permit that the pattern we've used for years doesn't afford?
  - Gigachad 4mo ago
    You don’t _have_ to update lenses. The updates pretty much just fix edge case autofocus issues usually with specific cameras and settings. Before update mechanisms you just had to deal with it or buy a new lens.
- Kirby64 4mo ago
  > If you have a microcontroller in the lens you have software in the lens and if you have software in the lens you're going to need to update it. No, no you shouldn’t. There’s no reason why a microcontroller should ever need its firmware updated. The only reason why you would need to update the firmware is to add features, which I guess is mildly interesting for the tamron, but like I said… you could handle all extra fancy focusing things in the camera body itself. Just give me a dumb lens that does exactly what the body tells it to do.
  - formerly_proven 4mo ago
    Most third party lenses reverse-engineer the AF protocol. They're going to need updates.
  - makeitdouble 4mo ago
    > Just give me a dumb lens that does exactly what the body tells it to do. It's hard to convey, but for instance you can reverse the fo us ring rotation, which probably only resonates with people who had to deal with it daily. Or you can adjust the ring travel. Or make the focus ring work as an aperture ring instead. Or straight disable annoying buttons. Up until now you'd have to go hunt the perfect lens where the maker was 100% on board with your preferences. Or adjust your whole shooting style to every gear you use. Sure a camera body could handle every single settings of third party lenses. But given what we've seen these 2 last decades, I don't think there was any chance of that happening. Tamron is partly Sony owned and they still did it on their own.
makeitdouble 4mo ago
The lens is communicating with the camera body, and you might want to adjust for newer bodies supporting more things for instance. I'm not aware of what exactly is changing, but I've already seen it happen with newer Sony bodies getting released, and an update going to Viltrox lenses to fully support thems. On the camera and lens being separate...in an ideal world you could ask the camera to do absolutely everything. In practice that's a tough order for a single company. The bright side is also that you can use a mildly older body while benefiting from a very flexible lens, or have different profiles for different lenses and not have the body care about which lens needs what. I can't imagine Nikon be bothered to properly operate a software ecosystem TBH.
BarkMore 4mo ago
> why on earth would I want firmware updates for a lens? One reason is to update the lens to work with new camera or new camera firmware.
FireBeyond 4mo ago
> Besides the slightly interesting stuff Tamron is doing, why on earth would I want firmware updates for a lens? Improved algorithms for focus hunting, diminishing chromatic aberration (most of it is in the glass but some positioning can tweak it). I get it, there's not a lot that will happen there, but some of that stuff will be useful on an investment that can easily be several thousand (I don't get into the wildlife telephotos, but two of my lenses were $3,300 or so - RF 85/1.2 and RF 28-70/2).
jeswin 4mo ago
Lenses are only tested on bodies which are available at the time of manufacture. They might focus hunt on newer bodies, because of tweaks to AF algorithms (for example, the speed at which instructions are transmitted). Sometimes in ways that can potentially cause damage long term.

entropie 4mo ago

> For those who haven't followed the camera world for a while, at this point a lens for a mirrorless camera will have a USB-C port to receive firmware updates. Iam not sure if this is a general truth. I recently bought a canon rf 24-70 f/2.8 which is pretty SOTA and it does not have an USBC port.

CarVac 4mo ago
Third party lenses that cannot be updated by the camera body will include a USB port.
- dylan604 4mo ago
  Why would this be a good idea to break away from the norm of what has been done before? The mechanism of updating the lens through the camera exists. Why reinvent the wheel? It only increases the BOM for the lens to include the USB and the electronics involved.
  - CobaltFire 4mo ago
    Because third party lenses cannot leverage the camera body to update. Sigma has a dock that allows updates to their lenses in this fashion however.
    - mahmoudhossam 4mo ago
      Only for their old "Art" lenses, the modern "Contemporary" lenses can leverage the camera body update mechanism and only need a file on the SD card containing the firmware update.
      - Sharlin 4mo ago
        "Contemporary" lenses aren’t more modern that "Art". The monikers were introduced at the same time, along with "Sports". Rather, "Art" is Sigma’s high-end line, similar to Canon’s "L". "Contemporary" on the other hand is a somewhat euphemistic term for "consumer" or "affordable".

josephg 4mo ago

This is only true for photography. For some reason, cinema lenses are still - for the most part - purely mechanical. For film and TV, most camera operators still focus manually - often via gears attached externally to the lens. Coming from modern photography, manual focusing is inconvenient and difficult to learn. But there's something very old-school cool about cine lenses. They feel great.

pastel8739 4mo ago
I think in cine it’s a lot more important to have smooth focus and to be able to control the focus speed, hence the MF lenses
- aeturnum 4mo ago
  I also think cine lenses have the budget to continue making high quality mechanical interfaces. Consumer lenses must have AF and so are incentivized to reuse that functionality if it would reduce the BoM.
  - josephg 4mo ago
    Hm, I'm not sure about that. I suspect autofocus motors are much more expensive to manufacture than mechanical lens throws. They're almost certainly more expensive to design. I don't know about other manufacturers, but recent sony lenses contain 4 autofocus motors, and they can snap autofocus in tens-to-hundreds of milliseconds depending on the distance. Where do they even put those motors in the lens housing? Its probably a scale thing. Photography lenses make up for the design, engineering and manufacturing costs with scale. Everyone who takes photos needs lenses. But far fewer films are made, and cine lenses are often rented. So they really can't be manufacturing that many units in total. I suspect they don't manufacture cine lenses in high enough volume to justify the engineering costs of fitting complex microcontrollers and motors into the lens housing. And if the production can afford to hire a focus puller anyway, autofocus just isn't that valuable.
- salvagedcircuit 4mo ago
  A large focus throw and more importantly, focus consistency, is paramount for cinema lenses. When you rack focus, the lens needs to show the same field of view every time, no questions asked. The early red pro cinema lenses had a design flaw where the focus rings would come loose over time and ruin shots. Someone clearly forgot the threadlocker.

jeswin 4mo ago

> at this point a lens for a mirrorless camera will have a USB-C port Ideally, camera bodies should support firmware updates via the body in a non-discriminatory way, but until then I wish manufacturers support firmware updates via USB-C. Looking at you Samyang Lens Station. I think users have been sufficiently upset, and they're adding USB-C to newer lenses.

dofm 4mo ago

I would contend that if you were to pick a trend line in the last ten, twelve years it is actually the return of high quality, cutting edge manual focus lenses for stills photography, which was a negligible market by 2014. Mirrorless has restored the utility of manual focus lenses in such a dramatic way that many of the significant advances in optical quality at every price point are happening in manual focus, and there is a real return to the understanding of the value of lens "character". Time will tell how much of this is a stepping-stone to Chinese manufacturers moving to AF lenses (which is definitely a part of it) but many of the best new lens designs are coming from the likes of Cosina-Voigtländer and various cinema-adjacent stills brands.

Forgeties79 4mo ago
Rokinon nailed their timing in particular in the 2010’s
- dofm 4mo ago
  LK Samyang, yeah, doing some great stuff. They also make some (all, maybe?) of the native lenses for the Cambo Actus, which is another mirrorless era winner.

grishka 4mo ago

> USB-C port to receive firmware updates. So do you mean that even camera lenses now ship unfinished?