Tamron lenses for instance will allow a wired control or a wireless dongle to communicate with an app/computer and change the lens behavior, switch what the physical buttons and rings do. Potentially you can manage stepping through settings for stop motion like effects, time lapses or stacking.
We're far from the days a lens was just metal and glass※. There are obvious downsides, but in practice it's actually a huge stepup IMHO. Every photographer is different and does different things, being able to fully adjust your gear is a godsend, especially as we need speed and reactivity.
※ there are still plenty, and plenty more will be designed and produced anew, but I don't think it's the major trend.
For some reason, cinema lenses are still - for the most part - purely mechanical. For film and TV, most camera operators still focus manually - often via gears attached externally to the lens.
Coming from modern photography, manual focusing is inconvenient and difficult to learn. But there's something very old-school cool about cine lenses. They feel great.
Ideally, camera bodies should support firmware updates via the body in a non-discriminatory way, but until then I wish manufacturers support firmware updates via USB-C.
Looking at you Samyang Lens Station. I think users have been sufficiently upset, and they're adding USB-C to newer lenses.
Iam not sure if this is a general truth. I recently bought a canon rf 24-70 f/2.8 which is pretty SOTA and it does not have an USBC port.
Sigma has a dock that allows updates to their lenses in this fashion however.
Besides the slightly interesting stuff Tamron is doing, why on earth would I want firmware updates for a lens? Also, this seems like it would be much more readily accomplished by the camera itself… if you’re doing weird stop motion racking and whatnot, why would you rely on the camera and lens being separate? Seems like kind of a pain to me.
I'm not aware of what exactly is changing, but I've already seen it happen with newer Sony bodies getting released, and an update going to Viltrox lenses to fully support thems.
On the camera and lens being separate...in an ideal world you could ask the camera to do absolutely everything. In practice that's a tough order for a single company.
The bright side is also that you can use a mildly older body while benefiting from a very flexible lens, or have different profiles for different lenses and not have the body care about which lens needs what.
I can't imagine Nikon be bothered to properly operate a software ecosystem TBH.
You could argue that the camera should do firmware updates but the manufacturers for (semi) open mounts like the ones Tamron is making lenses for don't want to have to design a protocol to do updates for third party lenses through the body when the lens manufacturer can just slap a USB port on the lens and call it a day.
The port is also useful for customizing the lens functions. For third party lenses the camera can't be expected to manage those functions.
No, no you shouldn’t. There’s no reason why a microcontroller should ever need its firmware updated. The only reason why you would need to update the firmware is to add features, which I guess is mildly interesting for the tamron, but like I said… you could handle all extra fancy focusing things in the camera body itself. Just give me a dumb lens that does exactly what the body tells it to do.
One reason is to update the lens to work with new camera or new camera firmware.
Improved algorithms for focus hunting, diminishing chromatic aberration (most of it is in the glass but some positioning can tweak it).
I get it, there's not a lot that will happen there, but some of that stuff will be useful on an investment that can easily be several thousand (I don't get into the wildlife telephotos, but two of my lenses were $3,300 or so - RF 85/1.2 and RF 28-70/2).
This is incredible work, though.
Even a fast fuse is very, very slow compared to semiconductors. I've seen transistors blow up to "protect" fuses. They're for stopping fires and preventing the slaughtering of batteries, nothing more, nothing less.