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Olympus M.Zuiko ED 300mm f/4 IS PRO announced
#21
The lens is very large because the lens designers of the mirrorless companies are less skilled, and the companies perform serious price gouging because the market for the non-kit lenses is mostly wealthier amateur users.  They charge such a crazy amount for a mere 300/4 because people will buy it for that.

#22
Well, the Canon 300mm f/4 IS and the classic Nikkor 300mm f/4 are just as big and a 300m f/4 lens remains a 300mm f/4 lens.

But yes, the smaller image field should have made it a little less fat at least.

While not really comparable the Pentax 60-250mm f/4 - thus an APS-C lens - is in a similar ballpark. 

 

About skills & size - there are many example of "too big" lenses from classic manufacturers - take the Zeiss Batis 85mm f/1.8 or Milvius 21mm f/2.8, the Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8, Canon 35mm f/1.4 II or a Sigma 50mm f/1.4 ART.

#23
Quote:The lens is very large because the lens designers of the mirrorless companies are less skilled, and the companies perform serious price gouging because the market for the non-kit lenses is mostly wealthier amateur users.  They charge such a crazy amount for a mere 300/4 because people will buy it for that.

@AiryDiscus:

Please rank the lens design ability of each lens/camera company from high to low!  Thanks.
#24
Quote:About skills & size - there are many example of "too big" lenses from classic manufacturers - take the Zeiss Batis 85mm f/1.8 or Milvius 21mm f/2.8, the Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8, Canon 35mm f/1.4 II or a Sigma 50mm f/1.4 ART.
Are they too big? If you want a well corrected lens with more elements in it than the periodic table, it isn't going to be the most compact. If you want small, there will be tradeoffs elsewhere.
<a class="bbc_url" href="http://snowporing.deviantart.com/">dA</a> Canon 7D2, 7D, 5D2, 600D, 450D, 300D IR modified, 1D, EF-S 10-18, 15-85, EF 35/2, 85/1.8, 135/2, 70-300L, 100-400L, MP-E65, Zeiss 2/50, Sigma 150 macro, 120-300/2.8, Samyang 8mm fisheye, Olympus E-P1, Panasonic 20/1.7, Sony HX9V, Fuji X100.
#25
Quote:Are they too big? If you want a well corrected lens with more elements in it than the periodic table, it isn't going to be the most compact. If you want small, there will be tradeoffs elsewhere.
Indeed, very true. There are of course some lenses that are big, yet are not really outstanding in their type (that Nikkor 17-55mm f2.8 at the long end comes to mind), but the rest in that list are good examples of how new optical designs that try to push IQ boundaries just are bigger than older ones.
#26
Of course I agree with that - I was primarily commenting on the statement that the mirrorless manufacturers are inferior per se.

Sony, Panasonic, Olympus and Fuji had optics divisions prior of entering the photographic market (again) so they aren't exactly rookies.

#27
Doing something for a long time doesn't make you good at it Smile  GM has been making cars for a long time but they still managed to go bankrupt, and they still put some real pieces of shit on the road (which isn't to say everything they make is truly terrible).  Same with Toyota and their now constant recalls for the frames of their vehicles.

 

Good lens designs have low angles of incidence on all optical surfaces; high AoIs produce higher order aberrations, and very sensitive to alignment.  To reduce the AoI one method is to "expand" the lens design and make it larger. 

 

In the case of telephoto lenses, it would be trivial to scale an existing double gauss lens up to 200mm or 300mm and then slow it down to f/4.  The result would be functionally the same as a sonnar-type design, a telephoto, a tessar, etc. 


There is a rather large formula for the telephoto ratio of a lens... it is a first order property akin to focal length or aperture.  Certainly a lower telephoto ratio (and thus shorter lens) increases the AoI, which reduces performance.  If the AoI cannot be sufficiently controlled in an all-spherical design and the aberrations cannot be canceled through clever design, newer technologies can be adopted (DO, aspherics, freeforms, newly "BR") to reduce the aberrations to an acceptable (i.e. near-zero) level.

 

The great white lenses often have relatively poor telephoto ratios (near 1x) as their designs accommodate many features (such as super-fast autofocus, teleconverter compatibility, image stabilization, reduced focus breathing, and exceptional correction), but the 300/4 PF sets a record in the consumer space at ~0.48x and is I would say is nearly at the limit for such a large detector. 


Assuming Olympus lacks the skill to properly implement diffractive optics, they could use aspheres to solve the same issues.  However, even if they simply remove the DO aspect and accept the reduced performance, the detector is much smaller so coma, astigmatism, petzval, distortion, and lateral color are already reduced greatly.  Re-optimizing with that in mind would yield a good performance.

 

I mean, the Canon 300/4 is a hair shorter and it covers 4x the detector while being well over a decade old now.

 

Regarding the ability of the various consumer optics firms, I would rate them something like the following:

 

1.  Zeiss - EUV litho and medical division for their aggressive utilization of freeform and aspheric optics

 

2.  ARRI - same reasons

 

3.  Canon - they seem to be miracle workers re: price/performance (10-18 stm etc) and also capable of very radical designs (11-24)

 

4.  Leica - Excellent use of aspheres, very good to excellent performance in extremely small sizes

 

5/6. Zeiss (ZE/Milvus/FE/etc) - not as good as they used to be but still offering top-notch lenses

 

5/6. Sigma - very good lenses of late

 

7.  Nikon - They're this far down for by and large being too conservative in the last decade+.  Simple lenses, average/good performance, expensive, not particularly small.

 

8.  Schneider - very good lenses, but extremely long development times.  Give a man 4 years to design a lens and almost anyone could produce something great by chance.

 

9.  Tamron - I may be being overly punitive because of sloppy construction on many/most lenses, but they have some excellent models like the new 35 and 45mm lenses in that regard.

 

10-xx Sony, Olympus, Panasonic, Fuji et al - I would never purchase a lens from any of these companies.  16% distortion in some models is simply inexcusable, very bad assembly quality, poor mechanics, and not particularly great performance out of any of them.

#28
Any idea whether the Zeiss/Leica lenses by Sony/Panasonic are really designed by them?

 

And about Zeiss - I am not aware a single better-than-average photographic zoom lens. Do you ?

This may be cost related but neither the Contax N nor the Sony/Zeiss zoom lenses are/were truly superb.

#29
I know you were asking AiryDiscus, Klaus, but since you were talking about "better than average zoom lenses", allow me to come up with these two:

 

[Image: Zeiss-CZ.2-28-80-T2.9-lens.jpg]

 

No bargain at around 20k $, but your question didn't contain the word "affordable"  ^_^

 

And the zooms they put in front of R100 II - IV are not that bad, are they?

#30
Yeah, yeah, I said "photographic" and that this may be "cost-related"  ... not "movie". ;-)

  


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