Patent: EF 400 f/4 DO IS II
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allows the use of extremely low dispersion glass, which also has a low refractive index. The low dispersion reduces color fringes.
I would say Japan (considering Canon is a Japanese company - they would file all initial Patent applications in Japan, and use world-wide agreements on IP protection whilst they filed patents elsewhere)ajf said:
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dolina said:
With the fluorite elements added in, I would expect a 400/4 DO to be VERY light weight. Especially if it also uses the new barrel materials found on the 300/2.8 II and its friends.
A lot of the price of these things has to do with the materials costs. It is far from cheap to grow flawless fluorite crystals, or properly etch DO glass elements, or even produce high quality optical glass. The first generation DO lenses lacked IQ a bit as they used a diffraction grating approach. I think new designs have moved towards particle dispersion in optical glass, which should offer significantly superior IQ.
I think the DO game will really get interesting when Canon ANNOUNCES 500, 600, and 800mm DO lenses at half the weight and shorter physical lengths than the current designs. They will probably cost the same, will probably not be quite as good as the non-DO but slightly better than the old generation versions of those lenses. The last generation of Canon supertelephoto lenses offered some of the best IQ you could get your hands on. That kind of IQ in a smaller, lighter, more manageable package that could easily be hand-held for hours...now THAT would be something very interesting.
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About a year ago, same DO Material, just a different focal length. Canon is covering them all with patents.goulab said:
Don't expect to see one soon though.
http://www.canonrumors.com/2012/04/patent-new-diffractive-optic-patents/
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TrumpetPower! said:
$150,000? Nah, I can't imagine even an f/2.8 100-400 zoom costing that much. I do think such a lens would probably cost as much as one of the supertele primes, though.
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jrista said:
Well, the 1200mm f/5.6 is $120,000. Considering that a super lightweight 100-400 f/2.8 with exotic technologies would be at least as much of an engineering feat as the 1200, I'd fully expect a six-figure price tag.
Come back in a decade or two and it might be a different story. But today?
b&
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TrumpetPower! said:
The cost of the 1200mm, like the cost of all the other supertele primes, is all about the amount of glass. The front element of the 1200mm has to be at least 215mm in diameter! That is 43% larger than the largest currently in Canon's lineup, the f/4 front element of the 600mm supertele. In contrast, a 100-400mm lens would need a front element SMALLER than the 600mm, by about 6%, for an f/2.8 aperture at 400mm. A 100-400mm lens, being a zoom lens, would probably need a little more glass than the 600mm lens, hence my price of $15,000 rather than $13,000. Given that it uses both DO and Fluorite elements, however, it shouldn't be quite the engineering feat the 1200mm lens was a couple of decades ago...it is BECAUSE of the advancements with diffractive optics and fluorite that Canon could make it cheaper to go along with being lighter.
And note...speaking in an entirely hypothetical context. ;P I don't ever see Canon making such a lens anyway. But if they did.
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jrista said:
Glass is melted sand. Glass is cheap -- even cheaper than a silicon wafer. Even fluorite is cheap and abundant.
What costs money is first the R&D; even Canon's very intelligent and skilled and very well paid engineers with all the equipment they might want at their disposal haven't yet truly figured out DO in the first place.
And what next costs money is the tooling. So you've got a bag of sand. How are you going to sinter it with the right trace elements into a bubble-free block the size you need? How're you going to grind that into the shape you need to the tolerances you need? How're you going to make however many thousands of these elements you need for the lenses you're going to sell, and where're you going to keep the individual machinery you're going to need for each different element? Or, how're you going to make a general-purpose lens manufacturing machine that can handle a broad range of the very different elements you need?
And let's not forget the housing, autofocus motors, IS gyros, and circuitry / firmware -- very little of which can be reused from lens to lens, especially with the big exotics.
Now, take the cost to make all the machinery -- again, the materials are a rounding error -- and divide by the number of lenses you expect to sell. Add in all the salaries you have to pay, all the taxes, all the shipping, all the environmental cleanup fees, all the rent, and a few pennies for the shareholders.
If you're going to sell lots of these lenses, you can spread that huge cost over all of them and wind up with a rather modest sale price.
But if you're only going to sell a few thousand, as I expect is the case with the Great Whites, then you have to make each buyer pay through the nose to offset all of that.
Think about it for a moment.
Do you really think that a 1200 is as expensive to make on a per-lens basis as an exotic luxury sports sedan? Or that a 400 f/2.8 costs more to make than an econobox?
No -- of course not!
But the sales volume is so low for the lenses....
Cheers,
b&
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GMCPhotographics
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TrumpetPower! said:
I love the way so many "lens experts" come out of the woodwork on camera forums...have you hand grinded any of your own optics??? Have you designed your own lenses and popped them on a camera? No...I haven't either.
According to various websites, the optics for the legendary ef 1200mm f5.6 were taken from the stock of FD 1200mm f5.6 lenses that Canon had. They made a new set of EF lenses, bu the optics were taken out of existing lenses. Canon haven't ground any EF front optics which is bigger than the current range of big whites (400/2.8, 600/f4, 800/5.6). Which leaves one to wonder if they no longer have that capability or they outsourced the original FD lens optics, which would explain why it's so darn expensive! It would also explain why Canon raided their old FD lenses to make only a handfull of the EF variants.
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>> I love the way so many "lens experts" come out of the woodwork on camera forums...have you hand
>> grinded any of your own optics??? Have you designed your own lenses and popped them on a camera?
>> No...I haven't either.
But my grandfather did most of his professional life - to military specs...
>> According to various websites, the optics for the legendary ef 1200mm f5.6 were taken from the stock of FD >> 1200mm f5.6 lenses that Canon had. They made a new set of EF lenses, bu the optics were taken out of
>> existing lenses. Canon haven't ground any EF front optics which is bigger than the current range of big
>> whites (400/2.8, 600/f4, 800/5.6). Which leaves one to wonder if they no longer have that capability or they
>> outsourced the original FD lens optics, which would explain why it's so darn expensive!
>> It would also explain why Canon raided their old FD lenses to make only a handfull of the EF variants.
Having created them they are hardly going to throw them away - converting to EF was a good way to push those professionals who used such a lens to digital.
Plus if they had the machine they would have hardly have it sitting around for years totally unused.
On the other hand, what worked then is hardly going to work as well now.
Back then it was hardly likely to be digitally controlled measurement and stepping motors, that they would want to employ now.
>> grinded any of your own optics??? Have you designed your own lenses and popped them on a camera?
>> No...I haven't either.
But my grandfather did most of his professional life - to military specs...
>> According to various websites, the optics for the legendary ef 1200mm f5.6 were taken from the stock of FD >> 1200mm f5.6 lenses that Canon had. They made a new set of EF lenses, bu the optics were taken out of
>> existing lenses. Canon haven't ground any EF front optics which is bigger than the current range of big
>> whites (400/2.8, 600/f4, 800/5.6). Which leaves one to wonder if they no longer have that capability or they
>> outsourced the original FD lens optics, which would explain why it's so darn expensive!
>> It would also explain why Canon raided their old FD lenses to make only a handfull of the EF variants.
Having created them they are hardly going to throw them away - converting to EF was a good way to push those professionals who used such a lens to digital.
Plus if they had the machine they would have hardly have it sitting around for years totally unused.
On the other hand, what worked then is hardly going to work as well now.
Back then it was hardly likely to be digitally controlled measurement and stepping motors, that they would want to employ now.
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GMCPhotographics said:
Had Canon outsourced production of the lens elements, they would have been cheaper, not more expensive. And they'd very likely still be available today, even if not packaged and sold by Canon.
That's because Canon wouldn't have outsourced to somebody smaller or less capable than themselves; they'd have outsourced to somebody who was already making such lenses, somebody who had already sunk the cost in R&D and tooling and what-not. Somebody whose own operation was so big that they had manufacturing capacity to spare for others, enough that they could sell to others for less than what it would cost to start from scratch -- else why buy from them in the first place?
That nobody else is selling camera lenses with >200mm front objectives should also be a pretty big clue that there isn't some secret mystical source of such beasts that Canon went to. By way of comparison, Meade's biggest refractor is comparable to Canon's current Great Whites, and other manufacturers of consumer refractors have similar specs at the top end of their lineups. It's only when you get out of the consumer realm into scientific instruments that you find anything in the range of the Canon 1200...and those, by definition, aren't mass-produced. Indeed, they're made in similar quantities to the Canon 1200, and cost as much...hmmm....
Cheers,
b&
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