Making ‘Art’: We go inside Sigma’s lens factory

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Lens elements awaiting the next stage in the lengthy shaping and polishing process. 

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After lens elements have been ground, polished and checked, they’re coated. This image shows elements being loaded into one of several large disc-shaped trays, prior to being moved into the huge vacuum evaporation machines which apply the coatings. 

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After coating, the lens elements are placed into groups, which are then assembled into the final lens. This shot shows workers checking and assembling lens elements into groups. The elements are held in place initially by friction, inside their TSC trays, before the TSC is heated at the edges and sealed to lock the elements into place. This type of construction replaces the much more involved traditional method where glass elements were held in place by metal bezels screwed tightly into the barrel.

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Time for lunch! Like many large factories, Sigma’s Aizu facility contains catering facilities for its workers, who eat here in staggered breaks throughout the working day.  

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Modern lenses are complex things. This is part of a lens barrel, with grooves for the various cams that keep the groups of elements moving smoothly as the lens is zoomed and focused. 

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These tiny pins are the main contact pins used in the hotshoes of Sigma’s cameras, prior to being chromed. Wherever possible, to save cost Sigma uses standard-sized pins and screws but Mr Yamaki tells me ‘designers are very good at designing non-standard parts’.

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All of this machining creates a lot of waste metal, which is packed up and sent away to be recycled.

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Two engineers in Sigma’s prototyping department review designs for a top-secret new lens design, which may or may not make it into full production. 

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Sigma’s Aizu factory uses a mixture of old and new machinery. Here, an engineer in the prototyping department adjusts one of the older machines.

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Here, a trainee reviews a virtual model of one of Sigma’s DP-series cameras on a computer.

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Although there are computers everywhere in Sigma’s Aizu factory, racks of drawings and blueprints can still be found in various areas around the factory floor.  

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These are pellets of glass-reinforced plastic, (Sigma calls it ‘Thermally Stable Composite’) used in the construction of various components in Sigma’s lenses, prior to being heated up and shaped into their final form.

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Although sometimes dismissed by the uninformed as being inferior to metal in the construction of precision optics, this kind of material can be shaped in ways that would be impossible with metal, and much more simply, too. Mr Yamaki tells me that injection-molded parts can be created with tolerances of +/- 1 micron. 

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An engineer in the injection molding area of the factory adjusts one of the ‘take out’ machines by hand. As you might expect from the name, the take out machine lifts finished parts from the injection molding machine and sorts them into boxes where they move on to the next stage in assembly. 

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This tray contains injection-molded TSC which will house contain lens elements. According to Mr Yamaki, TSC has similar thermal properties to alumimium and is considerably stronger than conventional glass/polycarbonate materials. 

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A huge amount of work in the Aizu factory is still done by hand. Here, a worker is hand-painting the white checkmark onto a row of focus mode switches. So next time you use one, spare a thought for the person who does this, for hours every day. 

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Do you recognize those shapes? They’re aperture blades – or rather the silhouettes of aperture blades, once they’ve been punched out.

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Here are the blades themselves, after being punched out and machined. 

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Rather than drilling, some of the finer holes which need to be made in various components (or normal sized holes in particularly hard metal components) are created through very precisely controlled electrical discharge. Electricity is discharged through these pins (shown here prior to installation in the electrical discharge machine).

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Video: Electric discharge machine

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A tray of lens mounts after machining, waiting to be chrome plated.

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Many of the components inside Sigma’s lenses, including the mounts, are chrome plated. Normally a highly toxic procedure Sigma uses a trivalent chromium process which – while more complicated in some respects – is safer for Sigma’s employees. Mr Yamaki tells me that this was a personal mission for his father.

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This is a rack of lens mounts, following chrome plating. 

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Anodization is another important process, which increases corrosion and wear resistance. Here, a rack of metal components is lowered into an acid bath as part of the anodization process. This part of the factory is hot and smelly – a distinct contrast to the clean, cool and unexpectedly quiet atmosphere in most of the facility. 

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The unfinished parts of two lens barrels, awaiting final touches and assembly.

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Here, a worker in Sigma’s Aizu factory prints lettering onto the barrels of one of the company’s lenses, using a silk screening process. 

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Once the printing is complete, the barrels are checked and put into racks awaiting final assembly. According to Mr Yamaki, his father came to value the staff at Sigma’s Aizu facility because of the character of the local population, which places a high importance on loyalty and hard work. Dave Etchells over at Imaging Resource retells the story (also recounted to me) better than I could here. 

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Final assembly in progress. After this comes the checking stage, to make sure that finished lenses are up to specification. This stage makes good use of Sigma’s ‘A1’ testing rig for MTF measurement. The A1 is built around the company’s ‘Merrill’ generation APS-C Foveon sensor, which for full-frame lenses is shifted to create four overlapping exposures, from which edge to edge MTF measurements can be taken.

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Every single lens in the ‘Global Vision’ series is tested in this way, and I have a fascinating picture of the A1 in use, which I’m afraid I can’t show you. Mr Yamaki allowed me greater access to his facility than any other manufacturer has on similar visits during the course of my career but some things – even at Sigma – are secret. 

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Editor’s note:

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Like Dave Etchells over at Imaging Resource (who’s excellent and delightfully techy writep of a 2013 tour of this facility can be found here) I love factories. Unlike Dave I’m not an engineer, even less an expert on optics, but it’s fascinating to see things being made. The sheer complexity of modern lenses, and the precision with which they are built is difficult to fully comprehend, even after you’ve seen the production lines. 

I hope you enjoyed this virtual tour as much as I enjoyed taking it. On behalf of myself and dpreview I’d like to sincerely thank Kazuto and Shinji Yamaki for their help and hospitality during my visit. I just wish I’d been able to get a closer look at that prototype lens…

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Making ‘Art’: We go inside Sigma’s lens factory

On our recent visit to Japan to attend the CP+ show in Yokohama we were fortunate to be invited to tour Sigma’s factory in Aizu. The Aizu factory is where all of Sigma’s lenses are manufactured, including the company’s impressive new ‘Art’ line of primes.

Covering an area of around 58,000 square meters, click through this slideshow to take a virtual tour of the factory, in the company of Kazuto Yamaki, Sigma’s CEO (pictured above). 

Comments

Remind me never to complain about a lens price

I have been to Leica’s old factory in Solms, so can I pay for a tour to Sigma’s?

Interesting visit! I actually clicked, viewed and read all of it, which i didn’t expect to.

Fantastic work. Purchasing a a lens from them soon.

Great article!

Interesting series, excellent pictures too in a rather difficult environment, as most factories are. Always fascinating to see how much precision, care and craftsmanship goes into precision mechanics and optics such as this.

Bravo DPR, Bravo Sigma!

how can I visit Sigma’s factory as an amateur photographer to put similar photos on my flickr?

I love these factory tours on your website. Please keep doing these.
It gives me a much better appreciation for the tools we use.

Nice article and photos, makes me appreciate the Sigma lenses I have more, as well as other technological items around the house.

Too bad that here in AmeriKa, our tax code is so prohibitive to corporations that few, high paying, skilled labor jobs are available…sad, very sad, plus AmeriKan pride has all but disappeared.

In about 20 years the only things AmeriKa will produce are low tech thing like food, a few simple products like fast food and of course medical diagnosis. Everything else will be made off-shore.

I may have to move to Japan, I love people with a solid work ethic, other people, not so much.

… a lot of medical diagnosis here in the U.S. are actually made in other countries such as Australia, then electronically sent back to the U.S.

Example: An x-ray is often sent to another country electronically to be read by a physician, then the diag. sent back to the physician assistant here in the U.S.. There’s a LOT of things electronically sent to other countries for processing, etc.

“I may have to move to Japan, I love people with a solid work ethic, other people, not so much.”

there is new legislation that forces every worker in japan to take vacations,because they noticed that overwork was hurting productivity. You will need to be able to show you took at least 5 days of full vacation time each year.

@ Aur

Which is a good thing. Many Asian countries are overdoing it too much, 15 hours work per day and the rest is eat and sleep. No time with family, no holiday. That’s how companies make a lot of money, but not how employes have an actual life…

So it’s an achievement that Japan forces the people and hey, 5 days is still nothing! I have 30 days per year of paid holidays in my German company, and with extra hours I have like 35-40 days per year off. I wouldn’t wanna trade this for anything, including lots of money!

There is almost no limit to the number of tax loopholes American corporation can and do exploit in order to avoid paying income taxes altogether.

But what do tax codes have to do with Sigma’s lens factory?

@Zeisschen: I think you are right. Nothing is more valuable than time. Free time.

I like the bit about the use of a more complex chrome-plating process out of concern for the welfare of Sigma’s staff. That seems to be an advantage of a family run relatively small concern.

One thing I’d like to know, why were there so many QC problems in Sigma lenses a few years back? Centering issues seemed to be endemic at one time.

Dan.

Great photography in the factory and I know that is not an easy environment. This was an interesting article. It gives an idea of the complexity of modern lenses. Sourcing locally is a good idea with benefits that may be beyond the ability of the bean counters to compute. I tried to find the material properties for “thermally stable composite” material but couldn’t. I’m particularly interested in the temperature range.

many jobs are QA jobs it seems

they will provide the lenses for hyperspectral imaging, so that quality control can be done by computers, which in turn will leave them without a job

Nice! Even the waste material to be recycled looks cool (aperture strips, anyone?).

Nice videos as well!

Need more entries like these ! Any chance of visiting Tamron or Zeiss (Cosina) factories ?

Neat!