I mean, they lack the experience in taking optics to the nth degree. And I don't what to hear how the Nikon 20mm 1.8 G beats the pants off the Zeiss-for-Nikon 21mm. The Zeiss will have sparkle & a mysterious color that even Leica can' match. Cheers
Chip, why do you say this?
Canon has lens patents since 1948; in the early 50s they patented a new 50/1.8 gauss lens with an improved type of correction {Canon Serenar 50/1.8}, patented both in Japan and in Germany, and afterwards the comparable Leitz(Leica) lens had to use a different, more complex design to achieve the same performance.
Nikon and Asahi Optical (Pentax) were making optics even before Canon.
Back in the mid 1950s some photojournalists back in the USA were widely vocal in saying that Nikon rangefinder lenses were better than the comparable Zeiss product, and this is what got the Nikon name rolling.
Nowadays you will find many forumers that will tell you that most of the 1950s Leica Screwmount Lenses are not better than the Nikon and Canon lenses of the same period. Ebay prices are still high for those lenses.
What is the reason for all this? In Germany there was a lot of patent protection and companies had to do all sorts of tricks to prevent stepping on each others' patents. In Japan after the war there was a lot of collaboration between camera and optics companies, promoted by the government. And they could use (steal) all the WWII german patents at will, since those did not apply to Japan. The initial, japanese lenses (up to about the late 1940s-early 1950s) were straight copies of German designs, but immediately afterwards new Japanese designs started to appear.
Many "Carl Zeiss" lenses of so much prestige nowadays are made by the TOMIOKA factory in Japan. So we can more or less say that those lenses are Yashica lenses.
Now in 2016 if you want to compare Zeiss versus Nikon/Canon, you need to compare lenses
with similar price tags and similar focal length+fstop configuration. When you can charge more, you can use higher precision and more expensive (better) glass types. When you build a slower lens, you can extract more performance, so for example a 50/2.0 of the same price than a 50/1.2 will theoretically be even more corrected. When you build a slightly longer lens, you can achieve better performance; that's why a 21mm lens, all else being equal, can be slightly better corrected than a 20mm lens and so on.
When you are not constrained to buying a compact lens, the designers can throw compactness down the drain and correct (improve) performance even further which is the case with the new Sigma "ART" lenses or the Zeiss Otus.
For example look at the Zeiss Otus 55/1.4, look everything that has in its favor:
- To hell with compactness
- No autofocus so we can use tighter precision on the focusing helicoids (more performance)
- 55mm instead of 50mm
- Price USD 4000.
Which is better, that lens? Or a Nikon 50/1.4G that at USD 450 can give good enough sharpness for many use, is vastly more compact, costs 10x less, and has autofocus?
None is better, because we're not comparing similar lenses. So we can't conclude Zeiss made a better lens! And now, i dare to say that if Canon wished to make a USD 4000 "55/1.4L" manual focus lens, they would make a better product than the Zeiss Otus. This because if i'm not mistaken their R&D budget is bigger, not because they had better engineers, etc.