George D. said:
The egami website that leaked the news says below the patent (jpn.translation): "cannot imagine the amount of money but the target group is EF 1200/5.6L USM and AI NIKKOR 1200-1700/5.6-8 ED IF users".
Do you know how many EF 1200/5.6L lenses were sold and to whom? It's in the forum.
As for the Nikkor counterpart user profile, see picture below.
So, this kind of target group doesn't care about cost, their agency pays. Only cares about portability.
1. No leak involved, Egami is a site that monitors public releases of patents, anyone can do it.
2. The 1200mm lenses were built for a specific baseball stadium in Japan, they could zoom in on the pitcher at 1200mm and the batter at 1700mm. With the Canon, you had to use the built-in TC to get 1680mm. Later, the newspapers started using them for other purposes. The cost is unknown, probably $75K in todays dollars.
The very high prices for the few copies of those lenses are based on the limited number available. A 1000mm lens will probably not change the value of them, they are for individuals who have the money and desire to collect rare items.
From the Nikon Web site:
http://www.nikon.com/about/feelnikon/recollections/r16_e/index.htm
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At Koshien Stadium the photographers' seats are situated next to the center-field back screen so as to enable news photographers to shoot the home plate, which is over 130 meters away. From this position it requires a focal length of 1200mm to capture the pitcher, the catcher, and the batter in frame, and a focal length of 1700mm to shoot a full-frame vertical photograph of the batter. In short, the 1200-1700mm was developed for shooting pictures from the photographers' seats at Koshien Stadium.
In 1980s, a rival company was making a 1200mm f/5.6 super telephoto lens. The newspapers were beginning to switch over to cameras made by this company in order to use the lens in their coverage of baseball at Koshien Stadium.
In May 1989, Nikon rushed to begin development of its own super telephoto lens for Koshien Stadium. The company resolved to complete the prototype by March 1990, in response to the fervent wishes of the newspapers.
"In order to complete the prototype by March, we had to complete the blueprints by the preceding July. Time was short. Moreover, we just didn't know where to start," says the mechanical designer of the lens.
"Seeing that we were developing a lens from scratch, it would be pointless if we did not surpass our competitor. The competitor's lens had a built-in teleconverter, which served as the mechanism for switching the focal length between 1200mm and 1700mm. We decided not to use a switching mechanism, and instead selected a zoom mechanism that enabled the photographer to freely adjust the focal length in the 1200mm to 1700mm range. Although the zoom method is more complex (both optically and mechanically), we knew that it would make framing adjustment easier and produce better photographs," adds the lens's optical designer.
