An exclusive interview with Kazuto Yamaki, CEO, Sigma

I recently had the opportunity to spend some time with Sigma global CEO Kazuto Yamaki during his visit to Kuala Lumpur for the dp0 Quattro launch, courtesy of regional distributors APD. What followed was a most interesting and candid discussion during which it became clear to me that he has a very adroit handle on things and a remarkable philosophy. I believe Sigma is going to be one of the companies that not just survives the market slowdown, but may well come out benefitting from it. Here’s why.

Sigma was founded in the early 1960s by Yamaki-san’s father; the company made accessibly-priced lenses and OEM products for other companies – and still do, at least until fairly recently. (I remember being not particularly excited about the myriad 18-several hundred zooms I had to review during my editorial days, but these continue to represent major volume for the company – and an easy sell to an audience for whom more is better.) Sigma is a family-owned business, and maintains the tradition of lifetime employment. The turning point was an economic one: the extremely strong yen of the 1990s and obligation to maintain domestic employment levels meant that producing high-volume low-price lenses domestically would not be sustainable. Moving production offshore was never an option, which meant the sole strategy available would be to go up the value chain. Sigma would now produce differentiated products at a price and performance level accessible to enthusiasts.

The upshot of this change is what we started to see with the early Foveon cameras, followed by what I’d think of as their first interesting lenses: the f2.8 zooms that were performance-competitive or better to the N and C equivalents; the affordable 30/1.4 DC 50mm-equivalent from the APS-C days that til today has no equivalent in Canon or Nikon lineups. What we see today in the form of the Art lenses, Merrills, Quattros and exotic glass – think 200-500/2.8 – are the fruits of that philosophy.

What I found particularly interesting is that unlike N, C and S – a lot of things are done differently at Sigma, leading to a fairly unique corporate culture. And it’s this atmosphere that becomes conducive to creativity. Yamaki-san works long hours, rising at 4.50 am and being the first one into the office – which he doesn’t strictly have, preferring a desk shared with the rest of his engineering team. The atmosphere is open, collegial and much more conducive to discussion than the more common strict Japanese hierachy. I have no clue who heads Nikon or Canon imaging, much less how to have a conversation with them. This is of course good and bad: Yamaki-san jokes that on the days he doesn’t bring a home-prepared lunch to work, his staff assume something is amiss with domestic matters.

I get the impression that his staff and partners overseas love him, and rightly so: this is a man whose firm has managed to attract top engineering talent away from the big boys because they are passionate enthusiasts who want to work on lenses – if they join N or C, for instance, they may spend their entire careers without that opportunity. I also get the feeling that he sometimes throws them into the deep end: product design starts with “a very precise concept” but little in the way of specification; that way, the final solution is down to the creativity of the engineers, with adaptations eventually made for budget and production. It goes a long way towards explaining why each generation of product seems so different – the concept may not change that much, but the technology available does. And it’s refreshing to see that innovation is the underlying driver of product development, not the need to ‘release a new product every six months’ or make sure the spec sheet of the successor has a number one greater than its predecessor.

Yamaki-san has probably heard enough of the most common questions asked on the internet, so I will only report in brief what was said and point out that ultimately, a lot of choices are about balancing engineering/design and economic decisions. Many solutions for the Quattro were tried; the best one was a thin but large-area body to dissipate the heat from the processors. At the same time, it was made long and thin to encourage stability: you have to use two hands to hold the camera with most of the weight support by your left underneath the lens barrel. I don’t believe the right side grip was made deliberately uncomfortable to encourage you to take your weight off it, though. The magnifying hood was not so much an afterthought as an admission that the camera should have had an EVF, but by that point it was too late in the design process – I have a sneaky feeling that we will see one in the Quattro’s successor. I raised the obvious question about Adobe: it isn’t Sigma that’s the problem, but some resistance from Adobe. It appears the ACR engine is optimised for Bayer conversions, making anything else require a serious software rewrite. The only way this is likely to happen is if Adobe sees a large enough user base – chicken and egg, given the weakest point of the package now is SPP. Even then, Yamaki-san has increased the number of engineers devoted to software to attempt to close this gap faster.

The Quattro doesn’t have an electronic shutter because of the readout speed required for the different sensor layers; it would be very difficult to do, so is unlikely to see a future release barring dramatic changes to sensor technology. But it’s not impossible: remember the sharp concept idea. Each generation of the Foveon cameras has been designed from scratch, including the sensor. It is both an admission that the cameras are a continuing evolution and something that suggests we are far from seeing the full potential of the concept yet: I suspect that economics once again play a big role the equation, seeing as these cameras are a particularly niche product and development costs are stratospheric.

Why keep a (presumably) marginally profitable, or even unprofitable line going into what is now its fourth incarnation (with a fifth presumably already in the works)? For the same reason they keep making the 10-20 200-500/2.8s they sell every year: to keep the culture, and hit the company’s vision to be the most innovative photographic company out there. There are still fundamental laws of optics and physics that aren’t easily circumventable, of course – a fast FF lens or lens of a certain resolving power is still going to be a certain size regardless of flange distance. Though they are looking into Sony FF lenses, there may be compromises made for size/resolving power/cost reasons – similar to the f2.8 M4/3 and APSC lenses they have made previously.

Innovation comes with one big challenge: if you are dealing with a completely new product that has no existing competitors, you have to make your own market. Yamaki-san admits that the Foveon cameras are definitely a niche product, but also doesn’t really know how big the ultimate market for those cameras is: I could see it being huge if the underlying sensor technology could be made to work in a transparent way that doesn’t require a lot of ancillary support in processing etc.

The first wave of adopters and opinion-influencers are the technologically savvy; they are more likely to live with first-generation quirks, but at the same time there is no excuse for lack of follow up support or other compromises (ahem, Sony). Yamaki-san goes out of his way to be accessible and to listen to user feedback – he is perhaps one of the most, if not the most accessible camera company CEO on the planet. In the long term, success in this business is down to both a solid product and a relationship with the user base: it makes it easier to both explain unconventional products as well as figure out future demand.

Later that evening, at a Sigma user dinner, he posed the question of ‘what would you like to see next?’ An 85/1.4 Art was top of the list, and I had to suggest a full frame Foveon mirrorless body designed for ultimate image quality and nothing else – he replied that the SD1M isn’t going to be the last interchangeable lens camera, and the project was still very much alive. What was far more encouraging was that he landed up having to pause people so he could make notes on specific suggestions to firmware, operability, etc.; he was looking for criticisms, not complements. Some wag joked he should read my previous reviews. Yamaki-san is definitely a social media savvy chap, though: one of the first things he said to me was he noticed I tagged him on Twitter that morning; I’m also very happy to report that he is very clear about the difference between a ‘blogger review’ and one from an actual photographer.

I have to also say that I do not own any Sigma products at the moment; I’ve used several generations of the Foveon all the way back to the original DP1, but found the workflow and shooting envelope too limiting for the way I shoot. They are cameras I really want to like – and all the more so after meeting the man behind them – but I still can’t quite figure out where they fit. More kudos are due to Yamaki-san and the APD guys simply for being so open and accommodating with me when they know I’m not even a user (Yamaki-san even invited me to visit the factory in Aizu). This is the kind of professionalism that the big brands need to take notice of if they want to ever grow their user base.

The biggest thing I came away with from the time spent with Yamaki-san was that above all, Sigma is a company run with both passion and focus. It is probably one of the few in the industry that has very much the right talent mix at the helm – engineering with creativity and above that, an enthusiasm for photography. It is a breath of fresh air in an industry that has really felt as though much of it is trying to see how much it can get away with of late with an increasingly half-baked string of products. I really want to support them for both integrity of conviction as well as a genuinely good product – without companies like this to keep the big boys in line, it would be very much our loss. MT

Lastly, on behalf of my readers – a huge thank you to Yamaki-san for his time, and Dr. Ng and Ng Wei Lee of regional distributors APD for arranging the interview. In addition, Yamaki-san has very generously indicated that he will do his best to reply any enquiries to both his twitter feed (@KazutoYamaki) and comments here, so if you have any questions: now’s the time to ask. 🙂

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