Nitecore Cine Lenses

[Chaitanya]

Nitecore a flashlight manufacturer announced couple of Cine lenses.
Here is the link to PR and image of specifications of those lenses:

NITECORE Superior Prime Full Frame Cinema Lenses are Released

NITECORE, Superior Prime, SP, Full Frame, Cinema Lens

flashlight.nitecore.com

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

As predicted a few years ago, Chinese companies are going into the lucrative lens market as soon as they gain the technology to polish and manufacture lenses. I'm sure that there are now many lens designers in China who want to start a company of their own, or work for a existing company to design camera lenses. The quality of the lenses is going to rapidly advance as well.

Nitecore is mainly a LED lighting and battery charger company and likely already has lens polishing capability, since flashlights often incorporate lenses, so they can use their equipment to jump into the business. Cinema lenses don't cost more to make, the market is smaller so prices are higher, a nimble company can take advantage of that and thrive on relatively small market items. Its interesting to see that their lenses can be adapted by the user to popular camera mounts, but you get PL mount standard, and have to purchase EF mount or other mount as a option as I read it.

 

[Chaitanya]

As predicted a few years ago, Chinese companies are going into the lucrative lens market as soon as they gain the technology to polish and manufacture lenses. I'm sure that there are now many lens designers in China who want to start a company of their own, or work for a existing company to design camera lenses. The quality of the lenses is going to rapidly advance as well.

Nitecore is mainly a LED lighting and battery charger company and likely already has lens polishing capability, since flashlights often incorporate lenses, so they can use their equipment to jump into the business. Cinema lenses don't cost more to make, the market is smaller so prices are higher, a nimble company can take advantage of that and thrive on relatively small market items. Its interesting to see that their lenses can be adapted by the user to popular camera mounts, but you get PL mount standard, and have to purchase EF mount or other mount as a option as I read it.

Its not just the glass but the reflector inside a light that needs polishing and precise shaping so it does make sense that a light maker has jumped to manufacturing lenses. Just curious to see if they have reused old designs or made their own for these lenses.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

Its not just the glass but the reflector inside a light that needs polishing and precise shaping so it does make sense that a light maker has jumped to manufacturing lenses. Just curious to see if they have reused old designs or made their own for these lenses.

I wonder as well. I doubt if we will see totally new designs, one step at a time. The big lens companies have not only lens designers with a ton of experience, but powerful computers doing ray tracing that used to be done by hand. Its a very intensive type of work.

Before I retired, the company I selected to make fiber optic components for aircraft use still did ray tracing by hand. There were all kinds of complex calculations for the lens shape, but in the end, it was ray tracing. I have no idea as to what is being done in my application today, but at the time, we were the first. We were told that it couldn't be done with the specs we wanted, but they were exceeded by a big margin. It involved mechanical work so accurate that no one in the world could directly measure it, I traveled the world looking. This gave QA no end of pain when they had to indirectly test by inserting the components into a system.

 

[LDS]

powerful computers doing ray tracing

Probably the available computing power - even for rent - is lowering the bar to enter the lens market. Then there are the manufacturing skills, true.