I was doing some clean-up and additions to the Other Lens Makers section of the Lens Database on this site. Would you believe we're now up to 150 lenses for mirrorless cameras that aren't made by the camera makers? And that's not counting all the mount variations; many of these lenses are available in multiple mounts.
In looking over the details, I found the following to be true: there really are only four sources of lenses:
- SE Asia — quite a few of the options are coming from cloners in SE Asia, particularly Taiwan and China (including Hong Kong as the output point).
- Korea — the Samyang plant spawns a lot of sub-label variations, but Samyang itself has quite a few lenses.
- Japan — no surprise there, as we've long had optical giants in Japan.
- Germany — while many of the German designers subcontract the manufacturing (mostly through Japan), Zeiss alone is responsible for quite a few X-mount and FE-mount lenses.
Give it a whirl: take a walk through the third-party maker lens pages on this site: Lens Database/Other Lens Makers. You might be surprised at what you find. Given that we're less than 10 years into the mirrorless era, there's a ton of activity happening that you might not see by walking into your local dealer.
