Comment by PaulHoule
2 months ago
It's bad enough that manufacturers in China might start complaining about it as the best manufacturers there have a reputation to protect.
There is a mushroom grower in Shanghai, for instance, which grows very inexpensive but tasty beech mushrooms in a giant vertical farm where workers only touch the mushrooms with a forklift (see https://www.finc-sh.com/en/about.aspx#fincvideo)
There are numerous photography equipment vendors in China that make innovative and value-conscious products (like this inexpensive manual focus lens which takes pictures like you've never seen: https://7artisans.store/products/50mm-f1-05) that excel in customer support. They post real manuals to their web sites where you can easily find them, they correspond to you with email and not a ticket system behind a CAPTCHA, they don't have a huge list of unauthorized vendors for whom they won't support your product if you bought from them, etc. I hear back from them in 24 hours most of the time compared to an Italian vendor that makes great tripods but takes more like four days to respond.
If Chinese vendors are working that hard to get my business I very much want to support them.
I borrowed a Laowa 100mm macro lens (Venus Optics) for a little while. The only reason I didn't buy one is it disabled TTL since it lacked the required electronics.
https://www.venuslens.net/product/laowa-100mm-f-2-8-2x-macro...
There are also several Chinese graphics tablet companies that Wacom still doesn't realize it's in competition with.
It depends what kind of shooting you are doing. I depend on autofocus for a lot of the work I do (sports) but I have more fun shooting with my manual 7Artisans lens with the aperture ring than I do with a Zeiss 55mm/1.4. The 7Artisans lens has weaknesses that show up when you try astrophotography with it (definitely some light goes the wrong way and bright stars turn into weird shapes) but it also takes great shots like
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111077882869934997
(freakin’ at night!) I bought this ring flash
https://godox.com/product-d/MF-R76.html
which requires manual metering to save more than $100 off one which has TTL metering as I am using it for studio work where I am going to set it up once and take 20 shots.