AF-100 Wishlist/Suggestion Discussion Thread

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Barry_Green said:
Canon 16-35 F/2.8 lens is the closest I can find, and that's $1420 at Adorama, and that's SLR style, not cinema style. Sony/Zeiss 16-35 f/2.8 is $1750. Nikon 17-35 f/2.8 is $1500. Now, if you want it to open up another full stop, that'll easily double the price, so $3,000 just for SLR. Then to convert it to cinema... that's gonna inflate the price massively.

I think the $3500 Duclos 11-16 f/2.8 is the closest you're going to find. For an affordable 12-36 cinema lens, somebody is going to have to make an SLR lens first for them to base it off of, and that alone is probably gonna cost $3k.
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dcloud said:
the closest would be Olympus' 14-35 2.0 its SLR style
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What makes a lens SLR style or cinema style? (If this is a noob/off topic question maybe you can link me to an article/video/website to learn what this means.)

What disadvantages for video would the Olympus 14-35 2.0 SLR lens have?

And how important is getting a cinema style instead of SLR style lens for use with an AF100?

Thanks.


EDIT: I noticed that back when they first announced the AF100 at NAB they had that Olympus 14-35 2.0 SLR lens on it.
 
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Barry_Green said:
Cooke T/2.0 15-40mm S4, at $48,100
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dcloud said:
Olympus' 14-35 2.0 its SLR style and $2000
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Now would be a good time to get this out the open.

A typical cinema lens costs 20 times as much as an SLR lens. But that does not mean that it cost the lens maker 20 times as much to make it. Neither does it mean that an SLR lens built like a cinema lens would cost 20 times as much. Cinema lenses cost so much partly because they have so few customers.

Cinema lenses all have PL mounts. Before RED, what cameras had PL mounts? Hollywood 35mm motion picture cameras. How many more PL-mount lenses would Cooke sell if they only charged $500?

As nice as a cinema lens is --- no doubt a paragon of engineering --- there are very, very few people in the world that they are worth anything to. The average person would not buy a Cook S4 even if you offered it to them for $5. They cannot use it. It does not fit on their camera --- if they even own an SLR. You might as well be selling them nuclear reactor control rods. It is just going to take up space in their house. So, it is literally worth less than nothing to them. You would have to pay them to keep it for you.

Even if you changed out the mount on a cinema quality lens, so that it fit on most people's SLRs, they still would not want them. It would still be worth less than the lenses they're used to. What, this lens weighs three times as much, doesn't zoom, and I have to manually set the focus and iris?

The up-front costs of making a cinema lens cannot be that much more than an SLR.

1. Lens designer salary may differ --- but which takes more skill? A fine manual lens or an average lens with autofocus, autoexposure, and stabilizer circuitry?

2. Materials are no doubt better. But it's still made out of glass, not diamonds.

3. Manufacturing costs. Cinema lenses are often made by hand, instead of in a factory. But that's because there are only so many customers, as mentioned before. It's a self-feeding cycle.

So, my penultimate point is that if there were as many buyers of cinema lenses as SLR lenses, cinema lenses would only cost . . . $2,000? $4,000?

And my ultimate point is that if an SLR lens were made with some more of the features that cinema lenses have, then it would not necessarily mean that it would cost $50,000 or even $10,000. Given that there is a dance between cost and demand, I imagine that a 14-98mm f/4 servo zoom could be had for $5000 (See my earlier post for why I think f/4 is good enough.)
 
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Nityananda_SCSMath said:
What makes a lens SLR style or cinema style? (If this is a noob/off topic question maybe you can link me to an article/video/website to learn what this means.)

What disadvantages for video would the Olympus 14-35 2.0 SLR lens have?

And how important is getting a cinema style instead of SLR style lens for use with an AF100?

Thanks.
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I don't use cine style lens, but, in my research of them, they have properties typically that make them easier to use for cinema applications. Granted, these don't always apply to every lens, but, it seems to be what a lot focus on

1) the focus is typically in reverse direction and it's both smoother and a longer throw typically helping for doing focus racks.

2) the aperature moves smoothly and not through steps, so you can rack aperature as well.

3) Most have geared ring built in for focus, aperature and zoom if a zoom lens. Also they are marked for easy reading of settings. Most cine lens are manual from what I have seen. You can use aftermarket products that allow electronic control through a motor like assembly. (think it's called Imprezo one of them).

4) Many breathe less, which means, when you rack focus between two objects, the whole image doesn't appear to get bigger or smaller slightly while you do so (although there are SLR lens that breathe very little as well).

5) Many maintain focus through a zoom. Not all DSLR lens do this and is important if you rack zoom.

This is just a few things, not getting into lens quality and such. Personally, I find working with SLR lens acceptable, but reading some professional stories of using cine lens, I understand why they exist. They make things easier when filming. But for me $20k for a lens is not easier :)
 
With Canon, Nikon, Panasonic, Sony etc all making DSLR's that shoot video I think we will definitely see them all offering cinema style zooms at moderate prices.
 
Bucknfl said:
With Canon, Nikon, Panasonic, Sony etc all making DSLR's that shoot video I think we will definitely see them all offering cinema style zooms at moderate prices.
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Not very probable. Most of their market is lenses from 200 to 1000 euro. Those 6,000 and 8,000 euro Canon primes do not sell very sell, that's why they are on the lens list of the Reverie clip on the Canon site:) If lens manufacturers could do fast high quality superzooms and there was a market for them (see cost), they would already have them available for the photography users. There are some design and manufacturing problems, but the real problem is the cost and the small niche these would represent. What is the market for these lenses? A dSLR user? How many dSLR users have more than 10,000 euro in lenses?

We have grown accustomed to high zoom ratio lenses even in 500 euro camcorders but those sell thousands and they are actually extremely low cost varifocals with a program that tries to adjust exposure as they zoom in/out. Cheap and the simplest possible design. These hardly cost 50 euro to manufacture, perhaps even less. The absolute aperture on an 1/6" f1.8 lens is less than 2mm in diameter. It obviously doesn't need much glass to produce it. 1/3" is still quite affordable, but larger than that at $2000 and $5000 and with cine features? No way.
 
Way.

Carl Zeiss Cine Lenses Target HDSLR Filmmakers
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2010/04/carl-zeiss-cine-lenses-target-hdslr-filmmakers-this-june/

While still expensive other manufactures will join Zeiss, Angenieux, and Fujinon in offering cinema lenses at more competitive prices. Red already offers a 17-50 zoom for $6000.00. My prediction is that a combination like Panasonic/Leica will be offering a cine style zoom for the AF-100 that would be compatible with a GH-1 for less than $5000.00, maybe way less. Olympus will probably have a cine zoom lens as well at a moderate price.
 
The LWZ does indeed look nice, but I don't think you're likely to like the price very much. The LWZ is a 15.5-45/T2.6 cinema zoom. While I haven't found the price for it, Angeniuex makes two competing zooms, one "regular" and one "budget". The budget one, the 16-42 f/2.8 Optimo Rouge, lists at $21,000. I don't expect that the Zeiss LWZ.2 will be any less expensive than that, and probably will be quite a bit north of that number. The "regular" film-capable Angenieux zoom, the Optimo 15-40, lists at $48,400. The "Rouge" is less expensive because its design doesn't let it work on film cameras, it's digital-only.

So, I expect the Zeiss LWZ.2 to be somewhere between that $21k figure and the $48,000 figure... but I'd love to be wrong...
 
I have a couple of questions. Since the GH1 is now a super camera, don't the codec specs of the AF100 seem a little low? Panasonic stated that the AVCHD is now up to 24 Mbps but the GH1 is already are at 44 and stable. Another question, what is the output from the HD SDI port? Is it 4:2:2? Basically, does the presence of HD SDI mean that 422 can be recorded to a nanoflash. Anyone knew if it dual link HD SDI? What bitrate is possible using a recorder like the nanoflash? Hopefully we will know more in the next couple of months.
 
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shorty15 said:
I have a couple of questions. Since the GH1 is now a super camera, don't the codec specs of the AF100 seem a little low? Panasonic stated that the AVCHD is now up to 24 Mbps but the GH1 is already are at 44 and stable. Another question, what is the output from the HD SDI port? Is it 4:2:2? Anyone knew if it dual link HD SDI? What bitrate is possible using a recorder like the nanoflash? Hopefully we will know more in the next couple of months.
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4:2:2 over the HD-SDI socket. Not dual link (HD-SDI ports ain't cheap). Codecs are more than their bitrates... on paper 24Mbps AVCHD is better than 35Mbps XDCam-EX. I won't go too much into it because if you're brave (or crazy) enough to go back and read the 1000+ posts in this thread, the codec choice arguement has been beaten like a dead horse 28 times over. Full bitrate AVCHD (21-24Mbps) is quite good. It's not AVC-Intra good... but for a sub $6k camera, you can't really complain. I'm really happy with AVCHD in my HMC150.
 
Panasonic is not one to shy away from non-standard alternate codecs. The TM700 has 28 Mbps AVCHD, GH1 has MJPEG. Perhaps Panasonic could offer an option for a non-standard AVCHD bitrate. The hardware certainly seems capable of it.
 
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