This does not surprise me, but where did you read this? Well, that could improve the market for my imagined high quality third party EVIL lenses!
P.S. Optrontec might well be the manufacturer of some of those Schneider-branded lenses too; Pentax seemed to make some of them for Samsung DSLRs, and I doubt that Schneider actually manufactures any such lenses, any more than Leica manufacturers lenses for Panasonic, or Zeiss manufactures lenses for Sony. (Design, maybe, but not always even that.) For lenses that I can afford, particularly ones that zoom or auto-focus, I have a prejudice for ones that carry a reputable Japanese brand like Canon, Nikon, Olympus or Pentax, rather than a prestigious German brand, because there is far more chance that it is actually the brand of the maker!
Optrontec actually put out a press release! As reported on k-rumors.com (July 9). The Sony "Zeiss" lenses are made in Japan (a country with its own very fine optical heritage) on Zeiss supplied equipment, supposedly with Zeiss quality control, and almost certainly by former Minolta (themselves highly reputable) lens technicians who now work for Sony (or by technicians who have been making well-regarded Sony video and cine lenses). I don't know the situation with the Panasonic "Leica" lenses as well, but it seems similar. I think the Samsung Schneider lenses are really Pentax lenses (they seemed to show up around the same time as the Samsung/Pentax partnership, with suspiciously similar specs)... I would assume that the "Schneiders" on compact cameras are probably also made by Pentax or someone else pretty good (they seem to be a real differentiator of the better Samsung compacts, just as only better Sony compacts have "Zeiss" lenses, and they do seem to be a cut above the lenses on their cheaper cameras).
Optrontec, on the other hand, is a company nobody's ever heard of as a lens maker, whose previous experience seems to be in cell phone camera lenses (I don't read Korean, so I can't confirm this from Optrontec's own website, but that showed up in some forum comments) and non-optical work. Additionally, they're located in a country where not a lot of lens manufacture takes place (very good and increasingly sophisticated electronics, yes -lenses, no), so skilled lens technicians may be harder to find. I don't have a prejudice one way or another between Japanese-made lenses with German names or Japanese ones, because optical gems like the 24-70 f2.8 Nikkor are completely Japanese, but the 35mm f2 Zeiss Biogon is a German/Japanese collaboration - both are wonderful lenses. I just don't believe that a company that has never made high quality lenses under their own name is especially likely to step up and play with the big names (whether German or Japanese) who have been making great lenses for 40 to 100 years. Cell phone and low end compact camera lenses don't strike me as a resume that qualifies a firm to make great lenses for a DX sensor - I bet Samsung was planing to have Pentax make the lenses, probably with a Schneider label, then got caught when their partnership with Pentax ended, leaving them with nobody to use besides Optrontec.
-Dan
