How lenses are made

Vitaliy_Kiselev

Vitaliy_Kiselev

ppcroft

The first picture posted here from Sigma factory tour deflated my consumerist ego. Second picture restored my vanity :-)

Nice videos.

johnnymossville

Pretty amazing to watch the videos. I often wondered how they did this. It's quite a process.

Vitaliy_Kiselev

Sigma factory tour

Be sure to check at http://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2013/09/19/a-geeks-tour-of-sigmas-aizu-lens-factory-precision-production-from-the-insi

tetakpatak

I will check if there are some old documentaries about manufacturing vintage lenses, before all those increddible machines were invented, that would be really interesting.

Something like this for camera lenses would be cool:

Butt

@nomad - They already had the Nikon Nikkor AI and AI-S in your hand? These are my "Strativarius"

Vitaliy_Kiselev

Guys, I think it went offtopic :-)

nomad

I doubt that even a master will make a plastic toy violin sound good, and there are a lot of plastic toys in lenses these days ;-)

OTOH, if you don't master a manual lens, none will be great…

Regarding the Minolta 24/2.8 VFC, it's a piece of very fine craft too. Optical quality is not better than the regular 24 (which is tack sharp), at least if you have a good sample. But it's said that QC was better on those specialty lenses, like the VFC, the Shift Rokkor or the Varisoft. Seems they were assembled in a special department by some of their best craftspeople.

I don't have proof for that, but my VFX is a little gem. But if you need a field that curves inwards (towards you), the Voigt 17.5 does it even better, albeit non-adjustable. It can be very nice for landscape foregrounds. The effect is not that prominent on the Rokkor, since you only use the center portion on the GH2.

tetakpatak

@nomad Cool, Leica. I would love to see how Rokkor 24/2.8 VFC was made, it's crazy lens didn't you write once that you own one?

Btw, I've held in hand several Stradivari violins, they feel actually quite similar like reasonably good "normal" violins. But there are craps among Strads as well, and they also cost few million. Only in the hands of great masters the great Strads can sound unmatched- but such masters can make also great sound on crap instrument. And there are so not many of such masters left....got quite rare.

The lenses are very different in this matter, crap lens makes even best camera look like crap. I talk only about crap lenses. No master of photography can make it look good....

nomad

Sure: those which are crap and still fetch high prices…

But regarding the most expensive cine lenses on the market (Leica Summilux) I had the pleasure to work with them for a whole day during a camera test. It feels like handling a Stradivari violin (I suppose, never did), they are worth the enormous price tag.

tetakpatak

Absolutely amazing! Are there any "too expensive lenses" existing after all?

balazer

How It's Made is one of my absolute favorite TV shows. ;)

kazuo

When i see all this effort put into sculpting a piece of glass, then I know there is no such thing as a cheap lens

Vitaliy_Kiselev

made few shots from article referenced above - http://fdtimes.com/articles/cooke/Cooke%20Book6_Web150dpi.pdf

Vitaliy_Kiselev

>No wonder they cost so much money.

Almost all machined gear require amazing amount of effort.
Lenses actually reduced in price in last 20-30 years due to automatisation of most stages.