Hello. We are here at IBC 2025 and we're at the Sigma booth and we're joined by Kazuto Yamaki, CEO of Sigma. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much for having me.
We have a few questions for you. Maybe the first one is about your line of lenses for 2025. So I think that you introduced nine autofocus lenses. I made a list. The first one is the 200mm f/2, the new lens, the 12mm, the 17 to 40mm, the 300 to 600 which you don't have here, the 135mm f/1.4 we'll talk about it, the 20 to 200 which is I think this one, and basically two cine lenses that are zoom cine lenses with autofocus, the 28 to 105 and the 28 to 45. So that's a huge amount of lenses for the show here and for the year basically. And what I wanted to ask you is, you're still a fairly small company, how were you able to manufacture or to create or design so many lenses and bring them to the market in one year?
Our engineers work very hard. What is great about us is that they are self-motivated because they are also photographers and they are photo enthusiasts. So they are really motivated to develop these lenses. And also we have a very streamlined R&D team. Normally we hire the junior engineers straight from school and they stay at the company many years, over 30, 40 years. So we have very smooth internal communication that makes our development very efficient.
Yeah. If you compare this even to Canon or Sony or other bigger companies, they don't come close to releasing nine autofocus lenses a year. And some of these lenses are completely new designs. They're not like adaptations of older designs or improvements, all the designs are completely new lenses.
That's a challenge because these days the market is not growing fast. So unless we make a very innovative product, the customers do not accept them. So we have to be very innovative to create something new, otherwise we cannot survive.
Yeah, because there are already so many lenses on the market, coming up with something completely new. So let's talk about something that is completely new. The first one I want to ask you about is the 135mm f/1.4. Yes, this is the first 135mm f/1.4 lens on the market. It's relatively compact. I mean it's not light, but it's 1.4 kg, so it's fairly light. And the aperture obviously, until now we had f/2 or f/1.8, this is f/1.4. What challenges did you have while designing this lens?
The challenge was to implement a very, very high optical performance while keeping the size compact and lightweight. For us it's not so difficult to achieve f/1.4 with autofocus, but it was quite challenging to make it compact and lightweight. But thanks to the lots of data, experience, and the knowledge to make this kind of lenses, we could make it.
And a question in terms of, it doesn't have IBIS, I'm assuming, right? An IBIS, a stabilization, not optical stabilization. Now, adding optical stabilization would make this lens significantly larger, right?
Not significantly, but it does add the size and weight.
So why did you decide not to add it?
Because the in-body stabilizer is good enough.
Works very well up to about 150 or 200mm.
150, as far as we tested, at 150 to 180. 135, and you can use this.
That's our understanding. Okay, that's interesting. Now let's talk about the other lens that you fairly recently, I think just before the show, introduced, and this is the 20 to 200. Now this is a very compact lens. It does extend quite a lot.
Yeah, but it's very, very light.
And in terms of, I didn't check obviously the image quality because it's very new, but again it starts from 20mm, so it's very, very wide. Like even Tamron released a lens recently that is 25 to 200. This is much, much wider than that. So I mean, I'm assuming that again just like with the 135, you had some sort of challenges designing such a wide zoom lens, right?
Again, we wanted to achieve some kind of innovation with this lens, and we think about the current customers. These days customers, even including the professional photographers, shoot images with phones, and now the smartphone covers a quite wide angle. So people are quite used to shooting wide angle. So we wanted to implement a 20mm. It's a very versatile capacity, 20 to 200.
