A Visit To Sigma's Aizu Factory

The day started off with soft pastels in the sky, but before long the fat, heavy snowflakes that Aizu, Japan is famous for started to fall. To judge from the amount of snow weighing down roofs and banked along the sidewalks, it was hardly the first snowfall of the winter.

Aizu is famous for skiing, Onsen (traditional Japanese hot spring baths), and the production of saki, but we were there for none of these things. Our purpose in Aizu was to visit the factory where Sigma’s lenses (and cameras) are made. The snow was falling hard inside, but you can forget the typical mess that comes with snow once you step through the doors.

One of the first thing that stood out to me was just how pristine, well, everything was. There’s not a speck of dust on the floors. The walls are spartan and spotless. Before beginning the tour our shoes were covered with protective booties, our clothes with a white lab coat, and our hair with snow white Sigma branded baseball caps.

But its all intentional. Dust is the enemy of lens design, as we all know. If you buy a new lens, and you can see a speck of dust inside, it doesn’t really matter if you know it is optically irrelevant; many of us are looking for our lens to be replaced.

That’s not a positive outcome if you’re a lens maker, so Sigma and it’s 1850 employees are fastidious in keeping the facility as dust free as possible. They are producing a whopping 75,000 lenses and 2000 cameras per month in this factory, and they aren’t interested in any of them coming back with dust inside.

As a lens reviewer I haven’t necessarily put a lot of thought into the manufacturing process and all that goes into lens production. Most of the time my job is to critique the finished product; are the elements centered? Are there sticking points in the action of the rings? How much are chromatic aberrations or flare artifacts impacting the image quality? As a photographer or lens buyer, you’re probably concerned about the same things.

But it’s pretty remarkable to see the countless steps that have to be taken to keep you and I happy. (*Most of the interior images of the factory were taken by Mike Last and are used by permission. You can check out more of his work here.)

It starts in a large room full of engineers who are pounding out code, working on product design, firmware updates, and solving problems.

Sigma’s factory is unique in that almost all of the product design, development, and manufacturing is done in house. I walked through dozens of spaces where a variety of raw materials were being turned into components that would be assembled into a lens or camera. Aluminum, brass, magnesium, and other metal alloys start as ingots or long spools to be stamped, cut, carved, or machined in massive, spotless machines. Some finished components are no bigger than your finger nail, while other assemblies (like this aluminum housing for the front elements of the new 300-600mm F4 Sport) are pretty huge.

Engineered plastics, resins, and even carbon fiber are being molded into housings and hoods in robotic machine. Glass is molded, polished, and inspected for scratches, dust, or any other imperfection. Paints are applied by machine but also by hand in very precise work to fill etched areas on lens barrels.

Here’s a look at all the pieces that went into the popular 150-600mm Sport lens…all produced in house at this factory.

What stood out to me is the wide variety of smells. Each material has its own unique smell that permeates its lab or factory space. Also unique was the wide variety of temperatures, as some spaces have to be cool while others radiate heat.

Most lenses have have least nine or ten optical elements in them, and its not rare to have twenty or more in telephoto zooms. Each one of those glass elements are personally inspected, and I saw a few being rejected because of some imperfection. Each element has to be properly centered, which involves polishing the edges to ensure they all fit perfectly into the optical assembly to ensure proper optical performance.

Assembly of all those many components comes together in multiple labs, and it is a mixture of robotic and human collaboration to produce the end result. Optical tests follow along with final quality control inspections, and only then is a lens ready for retail packaging and shipment. I saw hundreds of employees working in a wide variety of disciplines to produce the end result.

I’m not sure that I can comment on the “happiness” of the employees (Japanese are rarely gregarious by nature) but I can speak to their precision and attention to detail. I saw no slackers.

At the end of the day, my job description doesn’t change. I’m here to critique, evaluate (and where appropriate) praise the end product, but I certainly came away with a fresh appreciation of just how much goes into production of a modern lens. We are living in an externally parodoxical time, as while the photography industry is shrinking year by year, we are actually in a golden age for design and quality across the industry. I’m glad that Sigma remains an integral part of that landscape.

As always, this is a completely independent review. *Images and thoughts are my own.

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