Nikon has announced that it will soon be opening up a new DSLR-making factory in the Southeast Asian country of Laos (officially called Lao People’s Democratic Republic).
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On January 28, Nikon announced the 80th anniversary of the launch of the Nikkor lens brand, and that the total number of lenses manufactured since the beginning has exceeded 75 million units. The lineup now includes more than 80 types of lenses.

To celebrate the occasion, Nikon released the above video, which offers a behind-the-scenes look into how its widely used lenses are made. The video starts from the production of the glass from sand and goes through final assembly, all in three-and-a-half minutes.
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Nikon recently put out this short 3-minute video that offers an interesting glimpse into one of the critical steps of lens making: the production of the optical glass. It steps through the various stages of manufacturing, from combining the raw elements through examining the chunks of glass before they’re polished and perfected.
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Back in October, we shared some photos taken inside a small Chinese studio lighting maker named NiceFoto. Now we have a look at what operations look like at a much larger manufacturer: Godox. It’s reportedly the second largest studio lighting producer in all of China.
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Bloomberg published this short feature earlier today titled, “The World’s Most Wanted Camera vs. the iPhone Era.” In the video, reporter Nejra Cehic takes us on a brief behind-the-scenes tour of Leica’s gear manufacturing headquarters in Solms, Germany, and discusses what the future holds for the brand.
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Way back in February 2011, Canon announced that it is developing a new EF 200-400 f/4L IS 1.4x super-telephoto lens. Since then, there hasn’t been much news on when we might finally see the lens on store shelves, and Canon has issued a couple of press releases stating that it has been delayed. Rumors are now emerging that Canon had to go back to the drawing board with the lens in order to resolve a design flaw that had been reported during tests.
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There’s some pretty big news over in the cinema camera world today. RED founder Jim Jannard announced that massive price cuts have been made to the prices of his company’s high-end cinema cameras (which are also used for still photography).
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Want to see how studio lighting equipment is made? David Selby of Lighting Rumors was recently invited to tour the Shenzhen factory of a Chinese lighting company called NiceFoto, which sells gear both under its own brand name and to various international distributors under different marques. He snapped a number of photographs showing various workspaces where equipment is assembled.
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Electronics reverse-engineering company Chipworks has published an article that discusses and reviews Nikon’s use of Sony CMOS sensors in certain DSLRs:

The recent high profile Apple vs. Samsung patent infringement case further emphasizes the incestuous nature of the supply chain for components in consumer electronics. Apple has traditionally sourced a great many components for its smartphones and tablets from its competitor Samsung. An analogous relationship exists in the DSLR world where Nikon both designs its own CMOS image sensors (CIS) to be fabricated by a foundry partner, and sometimes uses CIS components from its camera competitor Sony [...] What is somewhat interesting is that after a run of Nikon-designed CIS devices in Nikon FF and APS-C cameras, Sony has muscled its way back in for the FF format D800 [...]

Sony supplies the CIS for the D800, a camera with the resolution (36.3 Mp) and performance that approaches the performance of medium format cameras for some applications [...] While there are certainly those who groan at the prospect of cranking up the resolution of a FF sensor, the D800 appears to be a disruptive event in the FF camera segment – one that Canon is rumored to likely respond to.

Chipworks notes that the D800 has the smallest pixel size of any full frame sensor it has examined so far. Canon is reportedly hard at work testing tiny pixels of its own.

Full Frame DSLR Cameras – Nikon vs Sony [Chipworks via Image Sensors World]

When Sony unveiled its “One Sony” game plan back in March after posting billions in losses, the company highlighted digital photography as one of its three main pillars going forward. It was a bit of a surprise, then, when Sony announced today that it will soon be closing a large lens manufacturing factory in Japan as part of the restructuring efforts.
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