I\'m not sure what you\'re trying to say here. The MPE 65 was designed to be used exactly the way it is--it\'s not like they took a stock 65mm lens, flipped it backwards, and stuck a telescopic extension tube on the back so they could squeeze an easy grand or two out of people looking for a high mag lens.
That\'s exactly what it is. No seriously.
No, that\'s not what it is.
It\'s an inverted 65mm lens, but it is not a stock lens used backwards, it is not a stock design used backwards, and it is not a repurposed anything. It is a lens that was designed to be used exactly the way it is presented, not some half-assed franken-lens they whipped up over lunch one day.
........? That seems a bit pendantic.
No, it\'s not. At least in my opinion. They didn\'t design a 65mm f2.8 lens for normal photography* and just flip it. They specifically designed an inverted 65mm lens for above life size photography. It\'s not optimized for anything other than that.
I\'d be very curious to see what happens if you hack the MPE 65 apart and mount it backwards. Somehow I don\'t think the \"flipped design\" will work as well as the flippant attitudes suggest.
The optical design is exactly that -- a flipped lens on tubes.
And the Zeiss Distagons (as with most SLR wide angles) are just inverted telephotos. Doesn\'t mean they were designed as telephoto lenses, and doesn\'t mean making a wide angle is as simple as designing a telephoto lens for normal photography and \"flipping it around\" (as you should know, since you use a reversed 28 for macro work). Nor does the presence or absence of exotic glass, radical aspherical elements, or other high profile optical tricks say anything about the effort that went into the design.
*The MPE was designed around the same time as the 100mm f2.8 Macro IF, which is ~65mm at 1:1 (the current 100L is 68mm at MFD), and I have no doubt that the design experience and lessons for those two lenses played off each other, but they are NOT the same lens--different numbers of elements, different groupings, different spacing, different aperture placement, different everything.
Aug 13, 2011 at 12:55 PM
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