Thom Hogan

In the course of the last six months, Nikon has had several planned outages of their cloud structure offerings. These last about nine hours, and impact Nikon Imaging Cloud, Nikon Image Space, NX Studio, and NX Tether. Nikon does send out emails in advance of these outages—the next one is February 12th—but those go to my junk folder and likely yours, too.

Here's the thing: Nikon wants us to use those services. The next planned one is basically the entire working hours here on the US East Coast. So using Nikon Imaging Cloud to automatically move images from camera to my own cloud services is out that day. 

Meanwhile, if you don't use NX Studio or NX Tether regularly, you may be on their 30-day sign-in time out at the time of Nikon's planned server maintenance. That means you wouldn't be able to use those products that day. As it happens, I don't use NX Tether often, so I pretty much always have to re-sign in every time I use it. I just won't be able to do that on February 12th. 

Ultimately, any cloud-type service needs to be essentially uninterrupted. It's one thing when there's a temporary outage due to something unplanned and needing immediate attention. But those are extremely rare on the services I use, and generally quite short in duration (not nine hours, as Nikon plans). The best companies also have swap-in-place systems with automatic fallback, which clearly Nikon does not have. 

This regular offline bit Nikon is doing is one of those things I call "frictions." Add up enough small frictions and the customer goes elsewhere. I've written for years that I don't believe Nikon is a world class software company, and this is another of those places where that shows up. Nikon has been basically teaching people to avoid connectivity with their cameras (e.g. all the SnapBridge issues, including how slowly it pairs). If that's what you teach people, why are you in the software business?

Short answer: Probably

Over the past week Chinese rumor sites began publishing information about an upcoming court hearing regarding a patent royalty dispute between Nikon and Viltrox. Since then, we've seen Japanese and American photo sites pick up on this, some going to the extent of using AI to translate those rumors and "interpret" what's going on. And then this week we've seen additional rumors out of China that other lens makers have been sent cease and desist letters, the usual precursor to an official suit. I have queries into my sources at Viltrox and others about this, and will post their responses should I receive any. However, it appears that the court date in early March for a Nikon/Viltrox hearing is being reported accurately (you can find that information on the Shanghai's court schedule). 

It's unclear from the information so far as to what Nikon really wants here. Cosina (Voigtlander), Sigma, and Tamron are known official licensees for the Z-mount, so it's clear that the mount is licensable. Each of the current licensees signed some sort of agreement with Nikon and make an official statement to that fact in their documentation and manuals; it's likely that this involved some payment to Nikon (e.g. mount royalty). 

This is a far trickier situation than any site I've seen so far describe. With Nikon making so many camera firmware updates—some of which involve things happening in the camera-lens communication—I would tend to argue that licensing the mount is something every third party lens maker should do, and Nikon appears to allow companies to do that. We've already seen one instance where a firmware update "broke" a licensed lens' compatibility and it was fixed. If there's no agreement between the camera maker and the lens maker, then there's no channel available for that sort of problem to get resolved quickly and correctly for customers.

This is one reason why I'm not particularly high on Chinese lenses, even when they appear to be good optically. Virtually every such lens I've owned and tested has had "bugs" or performance issues, some of which have been fixed with lens firmware updates. But then you have the problem of actually learning about, finding, and installing a lens firmware update. Sure, the lens has a USB-C connector on it, but sometimes the update is only available to install from Windows, which leaves Mac users in the lurch. And don't tell me this is better on the Sony E-mount than the Z-mount. I've had the same issues there.

For more than two decades I've advocated that Nikon should have a relatively simple and open licensing policy for all their protocols, and I don't regard FRAND-type payments associated with this to be a problem. (FRAND is an acronym for Fair, Reasonable, And Non-Discriminatory patent licensing terms.) In actuality, good FRAND licensing helps both companies and users avoid issues such as we've seen with some firmware updates. Nikon has FRAND licenses they signed to use patents from other companies in order to create the Z System, so there's no reason why they shouldn't do the same for those that want to use Nikon's patents to extend the overall Z System. Behind the scenes, this is the way most tech is done these days.

I've seen some comments about the whole "proprietary" thing being a problem and that "standards" don't cost money or involve licensing. For instance, Europe's forcing Apple to give up the Lightning connector for USB. Those comments are baloney: it costs money to official license the USB standard and conform to its policies, just as it did for the Lightning connector via Apple. Our cameras have dozens of FRAND licenses in the background that are being paid, and I believe that its perfectly fair for the mount and other communications that the camera makers provide should also be FRAND-licensable. 

The Chinese lens makers are acting like worst case Silicon Valley style entrepreneurs: they wish to disrupt (via pricing, mostly) an established industry and will take shortcuts in doing so. That so far has included ignoring both patents and trademarks, and in many cases, standards, as well. For instance, many low-cost charging adapters don't undergo 220v licensing, even though they support it. Why? Because every license is a cost, both in real money and in time to pass certifications.

Thing is, even if you're a disrupter, eventually you have to move to being part of the system. Viltrox, et.al., have no possibility of making Z-mount cameras, so one of three things eventually happens: (1) they acquiesce to lens mount licensing; (2) they don't license the mount and risk their products being disenfranchised; or (3) they just use what they learned by making lenses for other mounts to create their own lens mount and camera system (though they'll still run into patent issues doing that). 

If there's good news in all this, it's that the first court hearing is only a bit more than a month away. That means that we'll likely know fairly quickly how this resolves. 

The question I keep getting asked is this: "should I avoid buying Chinese lenses?" I can't 100% answer that for you, though my answer would be different for autofocus lenses (which require understanding the mount protocol at a higher level) than for manual focus lenses. No doubt that the Chinese designers have caught up quite quickly to where the end of the DSLR era prime lenses were, but they still have a ways to go to match current autofocus mirrorless optics from the Big Three (Canikony), particularly zooms.