Going through some photos shot about fourteen years ago served as a good reminder of how far gear has progressed since then. A D40X with the 18-55mm and 55-200mm kit lenses made some decent-looking photos—unless one wanted an 8″X10″ enlargement!
The 18-55mm, in particular, wouldn’t stand up to the image quality that phone cams from the last four or five years can produce. No wonder, then, that phones took off while the bottom fell out of the market for dedicated imaging devices.
Somewhere around 2015 or so, it seemed that the folks at Canikonympusonic realized that they needed to up their quality before their bottoms got upended. As a result, we started getting somewhat better IQ for our lens dollars. But for social media, phone cams were far and away the better value.
Sigma is the one company that seems to have the right idea about things. For the last several years, they’ve been consistently churning out one winner after another, topping Canikonympusonic on their own mounts, and doing so at lower prices than what the first-party makers charge for comparable lenses.
Good on the handphone market for driving lens makers to a better quality level. Good on Sigma for offering quality and prices that’ll bring handphone users back to the imaging market.
