>>3396526>Will we ever start to see serious Chinese cameras or lenses?When perceptions change.
People don't realise that in China you can get from bottom barrel stuff all the way up to the high end, according to what you pay.
China has all the manufacturing/industrial capacity, and the engineers, to produce top quality lenses. Not just "very good" lenses, but ones rivaling Zeiss and Leica.
One of the biggest cost of a high end lens, is labour: human labour spent in inspection, quality control, fine tuning by hand, etc.. And China has incredibly cheap skilled labour, compared to Germany or Japan.
They could easily design and then handpick the lenses with the tightest tolerances, test them and finetune them on the optical bench, and cherry pick the best performers. All that for maybe $600, selling to you for $1000. So you could get Summilux performance for a fraction of the price. Or, better than summilux for $2,000.
The problem though is market perception. People are not willing to pay $2,000 for Chinkaron 35mm f/1.4, even though it deats the Summilux in optical and build quality. Cause there's a preconception that chinese stuff is cheap crap.
Of course, this is not helped by the fact that most chinese manufacturers, decide to sell a $150 (production cost) lens for $500 than a $500 lens for $600, pocketing higher margins. So all we get is mid-low tier stuff, by design.