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 p.17 #17 · Thypoch Simera 50mm f/1.4 ASPH. Review | |
Doug Ball wrote:
phillip_pj All this takes me back to the old days when I used an Arri 16 S with three matched Cooke Taylor lenses. They were magnificent things to use. This raises the question; Did cinema lenses evolve out of still lenses, or visa versa.
The Leica invented film camera which evolved from using actual movie film by just rotating the film to get a different aspect ratio. Leica, Zeiss and Voitlander then developed small, efficient lenses to work with that. Was any inspiration for the design of these lenses inspired by the lens designs for cinema cameras? Probably not as cine cameras would have been much larger. The need for small and precise designs would have created a new starting point I imagine.
We have seen how lens design has evolved with still cameras. The Leica SL lenses, great as they are, are not pleasant to use if you prefer manual focusing, which is by wire. They also use computer profiles to deal with design problems such as distortion and other things, and often you do not have the option of overriding these built in corrections.
This is one reason I now prefer the older way of designing a lens. Get it right, and as you say, no profile needed in post. And having still lenses evolve from a cine point of expertise, is sort of interesting I think....Show more →
It strikes me that the use of computer profiles for dealing with "design problems such as distortion" ... has come at the hand of the designer, not inasmuch as it being a "problem". Rather, it seems that the stills industry has continued to make increasingly, optical design tradeoff's ... largely in the name of ever increasing "sharpness". In order to achieve certain optical contraindications, they "bend" the light through the use of ASPH optics, and the relationship between sharpness gains through aspherics vs. the penalty for distortion (bokeh, etc.) seems to be a kind of a quid pro quo relationship.
With that premise ... the ability to computer correct distortion is an "acceptable" solution in trade for the increase in resolving potential. Of course, other tradeoff's (e.g. size) can be influenced as well, to how much the designer is willing to make such quid pro quo decisions.
While I'm not in the cinema landscape ... I might think that the matter of distortion (and the number of frames with ever-changing perspectives) would be a nightmare for uniform correction in post-production. As such, the retention of consistently, well corrected for distortion might be favored by cinema designers, whereas ... it's an acceptable collateral option for stills designers.
In that regard (et al), I think the salient point that cine objectives and stills objectives are weighted differently to the markets (and production methods) they serve. In some regard, it seems some of the industry for stills has taken a "race to sharper" ... regardless of whether that is in the case of massively larger optics, such as Sigma Art series or Leica SL, etc. vs. the increased use of ASPH glass and bending (distortion inducing) the light ever-more reliant on post computer correction, as yet a different approach for that lp/mm race.
I've long felt that vignetting, distortion, CA, etc. were all inevitable options to be contended with in the realm of "choose your poison(s)" that you are willing to endure, in the decision making for optical design. Karbe seems to be focused on sharper, no matter what it takes to achieve with excellence, whereas his predecessors seemingly had more of a recipe for balancing the attributes of the optics, to retain an aesthetic (vs. maximum technical superiority) with excellent resolving capability, too.
I mean, take a look at the MTF charts of an SL APO vs. an M (and the trend's of change), and the difference of needing 40 lp/mm at 80 - 90 vs. accepting 60-70 ... and the accompanying size / distortion difference in design choices.
I guess I'm saying that some folks might prefer a smooth scalpel, instead of a crooked razor ... or something like that. 
So, yeah ... I can see that the cine vs. stills designers might go about things a bit differently.
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