Celebrating the Heritage of Longtime DCS Supporters ARRI, Cartoni, Sigma, and ZEISS

by James Mathers
Cinematographer and Founder of the Digital Cinema Society
(Excerpted from the January 2026 Digital Cinema Society eNewsletter)

It is no secret that it has been a tough period for the manufacturers of motion picture equipment. Some have sadly left the playing field while others have been acquired, (or “merged” if you will,) or downsized to an unrecognizable entity. And those are the only ones we know about with management honest enough to put their cards on the table. Now I don’t want to be a “Debbie Downer,” but truth be told, there is surely more bloodletting to come.

It has been especially challenging for DCS to reach out to these companies for sponsorship, and understandably, many have not been able to continue their support. However, let’s now look on the bright side and celebrate some of the companies that have stuck with us and have helped us to continue our mission of keeping the entertainment industry current on motion picture technology.

I have selected four longtime DCS sponsors who I would like to recognize, not just for keeping us alive, but also for steadfastly serving our industry, literally for generations. Please join me in celebrating these four companies:

ARRI — Cartoni — Sigma — ZEISS

Collectively, they have been in business for 445 years. ZEISS is the granddaddy, first forming in 1846, followed by ARRI with a partnership between Arnold and Richter in 1917. Cartoni got their start in 1935 and Sigma is the baby of the group founded in 1961. Besides being around for longer than most of us have been alive, I would like to point out a few additional traits they share. As far as I know, none of these companies are publicly traded. In fact Cartoni and Sigma are family owned and are still managed by the children of the original founders.

The descendants of Robert Richter still own a controlling interest in ARRI, (his heirs, the Stahl/Richter family, acquired the remaining 50% from the heirs of the other co-founder, August Arnold, in 2012,) and Christian Richter currently holds the title of a Managing Director. Meanwhile, ZEISS has a very unique ownership structure. After the passing of Carl Zeiss in 1889, his founding partner, Ernst Abbe created the Carl Zeiss Foundation, which would become the company’s sole owner. Its profits benefit science, social, and cultural projects, as well as their workforce.

As Sigma CEO Kazuto Yamaki explained in my interview with him at Cine Gear Expo 2025, these tightly held businesses don’t have to be solely focused on the daily stock price. This allows them to take a long term view toward product development, not being as concerned with short-term profit. Instead, they concentrate on creating quality products that will stand the test of time, providing value to their customers and building repeat business.

Another trait shared by these four venerable companies is that they prioritize making high-end tools for professionals. Their products are rarely among the least expensive, but I find that many times you get what you pay for, and in this case, it is quality workmanship and long term dependability. This is evident as legacy lenses are still some of the most sought after for their character, and cameras such as the original ARRI ALEXA continue to be used for professional productions more than 15 years after I saw them first being built during an ARRI Munich factory tour in 2010.

I was impressed on that visit when I noted a sign posted in the manufacturing area with the motto that roughly translated from German, reading: “Use Special Care, so the Customer Returns Instead of The Product.”  This ethos is reflected at every stage of manufacture and emblematic of ARRI factory technicians’ commitment to quality. However, it is nothing new; their 16mm and 35mm film cameras have been around for generations, and continue to be used, some of them manufactured many decades ago.

Although the SkyPanel is getting lots of competition these days, it was the most common professional lighting tool for over a decade, (that’s eons in the LED world,) and is still the go-to light for many DPs, Gaffers, and Lighting Directors.

ARRI also rents everything they manufacture and much more. ARRI Rental is one of the largest providers of motion picture gear in the world with a portfolio that includes digital cameras, lenses, camera accessories, as well as lighting and grip equipment.

In an effort to keep up with an ever-changing market and probably somewhat due to a downturn in cinema production, ARRI has recently pivoted to also providing live solutions. They have developed the ALEXA 35 Live system and recently partnered with HELM, a leading live production and broadcast integration specialist, to ensure that ARRI Live Solutions can be easily available for any project as a managed service, bringing cinema-quality images along with full workflow support.

Cartoni is another firm with a long, proud history who are now moving into the future. They recently celebrated 90 years of manufacturing products in service to the art of cinematography. Starting in the 1930s with Renato Cartoni (a.i.c.), who invented the Gyro Head, and later with his son, Guido, who pioneered fluid tripod heads, they have continued to innovate and raise the bar on camera support technology guided by precision, creativity, and reliability.

The company, headquartered in Rome, Italy, is now managed by a third generation of the Cartoni family, President and CEO Elisabetta Cartoni and her sister Beatrice Cartoni. The company is now developing Encoded Series (E-Heads) for advanced control across XR applications with a line of eleven encoded fluid heads ready for SFX, VFX, VR, and XR; all quite useful for modern filmmaking and virtual production.

ZEISS is the eldest of the group, founded in 1846 by Carl Zeiss in Jena, Germany, collaborating with Ernst Abbe to create high-quality microscopes. The optical technology they developed for microscope lenses later found applications in pioneering photography and eyewear lenses. The Planar anastigmatic lens design was patented by ZEISS in 1896 and has been used in the lion’s share of high quality cameras for decades. Antireflective lens coatings were then developed in 1935 to tap into the full potential of the lenses and have been installed in countless variations by a large number of manufacturers, and new designs are constantly entering the market to this very day.

Today, ZEISS is one of the world’s leading companies when it comes to developing and producing high-performance camera lenses for all areas of photography and cinematography. The lenses that are more relevant to motion picture production fall under the division of ZEISS Cinematography. They continue to develop and manufacture the most advanced cinema lenses at a variety of price points to serve a wide range of professional applications.

They are also among the pioneers in the area of lens metadata. ZEISS eXtended Data protocols simplify and increase the accuracy of the image capture and processing workflow by unifying key lens data along with the ZEISS lens distortion and shading data. This can be applied in post-production for more accurate compositing and most recently they have integrated this lens metadata technology into a system called CinCraft Scenario, a complete camera tracking system that captures accurate camera movements for compositing and virtual production applications.

Now for the baby of the group, Sigma, which has only been around a “short” 65 years. Sigma was founded in 1961 by Michihiro Yamaki in Japan as an independent manufacturer focused on high-quality, third-party interchangeable lenses.  (Michihiro is pictured in the group shot above on the right). Sigma is proud to be the world’s largest independent lens manufacturer, and is still a family-owned business run by the founder’s son, Kazuto Yamaki. They were keenly innovative from the early days, having released the first-ever teleconverter in 1961 and the first wide-angle zoom in 1979.

More recently they have produced a large variety of premium stills and motion lenses exclusively in their Aizu, Japan factory. In fact, their most recent cinema lens product is named after the town. Their new Aizu prime series is currently made up of eight extremely high-end, large-format cine primes with each lens having an impressively fast T-stop of T1.3.

Although they may be best known for making still and cinema lenses, Sigma has also produced many cameras over the years. The latest is the Sigma fp, an extremely compact mirrorless digital camera with a full-frame sensor.  The 61-megapixel fp L camera weighs less than a pound and is capable of supporting both serious still and cine capture at up to UHD 4K30p Video with 12-Bit CinemaDNG.

All the advancements of the aforementioned companies have not gone unnoticed; they have all won numerous awards ranging from Sci-Tech Academy Awards, Emmys, and more. I can tell you for sure that they are greatly appreciated by The Digital Cinema Society. Even as times have been tough in our industry they have stuck by us and are largely responsible for supporting our continued existence.

With sincere thanks to ARRI, Cartoni, Sigma, and ZEISS, let’s wish them many more years of prosperous service to our community and support them with our business as they have support all of us.

For more details, check out these links:

• James Mathers’ DCS interview with Sigma’s Kazuto Yamaki at Cine Gear Expo 2025: https://vimeo.com/1093410883
• Cartoni’s fun look at their factory and heritage in celebration of 90 years: https://vimeo.com/1159915223
• For more details on ZEISS CinCraft Scenario camera tracking system: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUC08lor_9MiMl4FJMq9r2N5Uf6KAwrlU
• A nice article written by Film and Digital Times Editor Jon Fauer: “The History of ARRI in a Century of Cinema”:  https://www.arri.com/en/company/the-arri-philosophy/history/the-history-of-arri-in-a-century-of-cinema