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Camera Lens News No. 3
Winter 1997/98 |
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Production of Carl Zeiss cine lenses drastically up over last year
Cine Lenses are a very particular breed of optics. The image they produce on film is less than one inch wide (in the case of feature films, that are usually shot on 35 mm stock) but will later be projected onto screens up to 30 feet wide. So, enlarging ratios in the region of 500x are not unusual. Very high demands of imaging performance are placed on film stock and lenses alike.
Different from professional still photography, where focusing is normally done on a ground glass or focusing screen with special focusing aids like split field inicator or micro-prism arrays, focusing in motion picture production is not performed visually, even though cameras with reflex viewfinders are industry standard, but by using individually calibrated scales on the lenses. Providing those scales with the lens barrels is a quite demanding task both from a series production and logistics point of view.
Due to their stunning sharpness combined with extreme speed of up to T 1.3 Carl Zeiss lenses have been the premium choice for the motion picture industry’s most demanding directors of photography. However, these lenses had been in short supply.
Now, with reengineered logistics and after sizable investment, Carl Zeiss has overcome a bottleneck that, in the past, severely limited the production of cine lenses. Monthly lens shipment figures to Carl Zeiss’s partner in the motion picture business, Arnold & Richter (ARRI) in Munich, have recently gone up by more than 30% over last year’s numbers, giving ARRI’s sales a significant boost. | |
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