05-20-2015, 11:13 PM
Quote:You can't just drop low dispersion glasses into a design without changing anything else, everything else will change radically if you do that. The lens would be completely different if it used extra low dispersion materials.
The Canon being an L lens (better build, probably weather sealed) would not make it a heavyweight... Nor would UD elements.
Quote:Stated frankly, today's level of performance in yesteryear's size envelope is impossible without extremely high prices. Compact+high performance is very hard to pull off. There is an accelerated development cycle for mirrorless, but I do not believe that in general it is the cause of big lenses.
Of course, it may be that the Fuji just is a "modern" design approach, where the quest for easy sharpness makes for heavy big lenses (think Sigma 50mm f1.4 Art, Otus nr 1 and 2 for instance).
Quote:"covering" a bigger format with long lens designs requires a larger rear element size but does not cause an especially large change in the size of the front of the lens.
And that Leica is 135 format coverable.
The Canon EF 85mm f1.8 USM is actually not much smaller than the Fuji, though. It measures 75mm x 71.5mm, and the Fuji flange distance being 17.7mm and the EOS one 44mm, the length difference is just 78.7 - 71.5 = 7.2mm. Small difference. But yeah, the Fuji is only APS-C (at least, I can't speculate on Fuji starting an FF X-body and is designing lenses with FF coverage already), and that makes it a pretty heavy lens.