South Korean lens manufacturer Samyang has joined the L-mount Alliance, which should significantly expand the lens options for Panasonic, Sigma and Leica L-mount camera owners.
Samyang has been around for 50 years, and in the last 10 years or so has made a name with low-cost lenses offering good performance for the money. It has other brands besides Samyang, including Rokinon and Bower. It is one of the few lensmakers offering an extensive manual focus range across most popular mounts. Samyang offers several Canon RF-format manual lenses, but like other specialist lensmakers has been denied access to Canon’s RF lens mount design specs.
Given Samyang already offers a range of lenses for the mirrorless Sony EF-mount – mainly primes – it should be relatively easy to move these lens designs over to the L-Mount format.
With both Sigma and now Samyang offering L-Mount lens options, the L-mount becomes a more attractive option for prospective camera buyers, with more affordable third-party lenses from budget manual models (Samyang) right through to premium, wide-aperture primes (Sigma Art). This also weakens the ‘closed system’ strategies of the likes of Canon and Nikon.
Another company, Japanese specialist camera manufacturer Astrodesign, joined the L-mount alliance at around the same time: ‘Specializing in real-time high-speed digital signal processing technology, we have developed several ‘world’s first’ or ‘first in Japan’ products, including our many 8K devices,’ explains the Astrodesign website.
Samyang and Astrodesign are the sixth and seventh company to join the L-mount alliance. The full list of L-mount ‘allies’ is Leica, Panasonic, Sigma, Leitz, DJI, Astrodesign and Samyang.
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