Canon Cinema lenses?

A car company makes 1million in bulk, on a factory line, cars and sells them for $40k, they sell them a lot of them.

A lens company usually makes 100 sets of lenses, and sells all of them, over the course of 3 years. They still need to keep the company afloat, and pay for the lens pieces and still make a profit. Plus, there are so few lens companies out there, they have to mark up. So they have to charge $40k.
 
Thank you. It kind of blows your mind how much buying and selling goes on in the world. So, I guess about 200 or 300 of just this one lens gets bought a month.

Here's some more information I found:

1) What lenses work well for motion picture? Obviously cine lenses work best for motion picture. The glass used in still lenses works well, but isn’t always suited for motion. Still lenses tend to breathe, the image is not stable and “jumps” when focused or zoomed. There are some still lenses that work well such as full manual lenses like Nikon AIS, Leica R, or Zeiss ZF. These lenses are built very well and eliminate some of the flaws of modern auto focus lenses. There are many other characteristics to consider. Like, does the lens telescope when you zoom? This can create problems with a mattebox. Internal focus lenses are a much better option. Most auto focus lenses lack a hard stop at the end of focus travel and will not work well for marking distances with a follow focus.
2) I have a bunch of still lenses. Can they be converted to work for cinema? There are certain measures that can be taken to help still lenses get close to cinema lenses. It all boils down to usability. You can modify your lenses with a Cine-Mod and it will help quite a bit. Simple add-ons and minor modifications can go a long way.
3) What is a Cine-Mod? A Cine-Mod is a procedure that Duclos Lenses performs. The standard cine-mod consists of a three part process including a solid, seamless delrin focus gear, de-clicking the aperture for smooth movement, and an 80mm step up ring for clamp on accessories, all of which are customizable to suit the users needs. It makes still photo lenses more suitable for motion picture use.
4) Can my lens be Cine-Modded? Most still lenses can receive the Cine-Mod. As long as there is a surface to attach the focus gear, and a threaded front ring, it is usually possible. Some modern lenses do not have a manual aperture ring and cannot be de-clicked.
5) What lenses are well suited for a Cine-Mod? The lenses that benefit most from the Cine-Mod are full manual lenses with longer focus throw and metal housings such as Nikon Ais, Leica R, and Zeiss ZF. Auto focus lenses will still have a relatively short focus throw and possibly no aperture ring.
6) Can the mount on my lens be changed? Certain lens mounts can be easily adapted. Over the years people have made adaptors for many styles of mounts. Nikon to Canon. B to PL. Etc. But some lenses cannot be easily changed. For example, Putting a hard PL mount on a Nikon lens is very difficult and usually requires re-engineering most of the lens to accommodate a PL mount usually costing more than a PL mount lens in the first place. Another common lens conversion would be the Russian OCT 19 to PL. People love the look of the old Russian Lomo lenses. These can usually be converted easily but the cost is high and the build quality of Lomo lenses is not advantageous.
7) I have Nikon lenses. Can the focus be reversed? Not really… Reversing the focus direction requires hours and hours of design and engineering. It basically requires designing and building a new focus mechanism. In short, yes it can be done… But to 99% of shooters, the cost is prohibitive. The simplest solution is a focus reversing gear that goes between the lens and a follow focus or simply a follow focus that allows for reversed travel.
8] The focus throw of my still lenses is short, can it be expanded? Sometimes this can be done by using specific gears on a follow focus unit. But extending the travel within the lens would again require re-engineering the focus mechanics. This also is cost prohibitive. It would be cheaper to simply purchase a proper cine lens with the appropriate focus travel.
9) Can lens breathing be corrected? No. Breathing is a characteristic that is considered when the lens is designed. Most still lenses breath simply because it doesn’t matter since you don’t focus as you take a still photo. Cine lens designs take this into consideration and compensate for it. This is a major part of the cost difference between still and cine lenses.
10) Can my lens be rehoused for cinema use? What is the cost? Re-housing lenses is a very long, expensive, and involved process. Duclos Lenses spends months and months on a single design in order to achieve a lens that works as well as it can for cinema use. While there are many still lenses that are great for shooting stills, most are just not suitable for a complete re-house. Duclos Lenses tries to accommodate users with lens features such as focal length, max aperture, size and weight, that are not available from other manufacturers. There is a very specific set of criteria that must be met in order to consider a lens for re-housing. Very few lenses meet this criteria. It’s almost always more expensive to rehouse a single still photo lens for cinema use than it is to purchase a new cinema lens.

--- http://matthewduclos.wordpress.com/2010/11/03/lens-mod-faq/

A couple other interesting articles:
- http://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2011/06/photo-lenses-for-video-there-is-no-free-lunch
- http://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2011/02/photo-lenses-for-video (includes a list of lenses that are "parfocal" --- as opposed to varifocal. Parfocal zoom lenses do not change focus when you zoom)
 
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Which brings up that $7,000 is less than cine lenses have been. As stated above, they're $20,000 or $30,000 each, if you get the PL mounted ones from Cooke and company)
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The CP.2s come in PL mount also.
 
aguia said:
Y... The fact is though that there are people making and selling cine lenses (both stills and primes) for a lot less than this new series from Canon, why can RED do it and Canon can't?.
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Didn´t RED just rehouse still glass? Don´t know if that applies to the new lenses also.

On the other hand, would you really think, that cineglass would make a real difference in your final picture (and I mean delivery for TV/Theatre or BluRay aka higly compressed) on a DSLR?

I bet a car priced 35mm T1.4 Arri or Canon or Cooke would´t hardly (if at all) make any visible difference on my FS100, compared to $350 Samyang 35/1.4. after compression in a theater.

So mechanical quality, marks (could not care less about marks), no breathing is all that´s left for the price of a car.

Actually there are a gazillion spots on a production, where that money (even if rented) would be better spend, than on cineglass IMHO.

Dang! And now beat me.

Frank
 
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A cine lens is expensive because you're paying for:
  1. Top of the line optical performance
  2. Top of the line mechanical performance
  3. Expertise to deliver #1 and #2
  4. All of this done in very low volume
Excellent optical performance is pretty hard. There are dozens of qualities they're trying to optimize and it has to be done at different apertures and focus distances: center sharpness, corner sharpness, contrast ratio, chromatic and monochromatic aberrations, light distribution across the image plane (vignetting), black reproduction, handling of highlights, geometric distortion, and spectral transmittance (color).

To do this, they use many different glass materials and exotic coatings. The elements are ground to extreme precision, sometimes spending 20 hours on the grinding/polishing machine. Cine lenses are basically top of the line. They have to be sharp across the whole frame, the color has to be consistent from lens to lens and the focus breathing should zero, ideally.

These high performance parameters also depend on the mechanical design. The elements have to be held very precisely in the correct position. Designers account for the different coefficients of thermal expansion of the glass material and the lens housing materials so that the lens maintains its performance over the temperature range. This affects tolerances even more.

The focus throw is how much the lens barrel rotates from near to infinity focus. Still photo AF lenses have a short throw (~45° or less) to AF quickly. Cine lenses have much larger throws, like 300° in these Canon primes. They must be repeatable and accurate, which means tighter tolerances. The focus markings are often individually calibrated for each lens. To do all this, the focus mechanism is usually a complicated, precise and expensive cam system.

FD Times has many articles and factory tours on these major cine lens companies:
http://www.fdtimes.com/articles/

You can take a virtual tour of Canon's lens factory here:
http://www.canon.com/camera-museum/tech/l_plant/

Learn more about HD lens design with Larry Thorpe:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF91j-5WpNI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BUmmWXL1xM&feature=related
 
10) Can my lens be rehoused for cinema use? What is the cost? Re-housing lenses is a very long, expensive, and involved process. Duclos Lenses spends months and months on a single design in order to achieve a lens that works as well as it can for cinema use. While there are many still lenses that are great for shooting stills, most are just not suitable for a complete re-house. Duclos Lenses tries to accommodate users with lens features such as focal length, max aperture, size and weight, that are not available from other manufacturers. There is a very specific set of criteria that must be met in order to consider a lens for re-housing. Very few lenses meet this criteria. It’s almost always more expensive to rehouse a single still photo lens for cinema use than it is to purchase a new cinema lens.

--- http://matthewduclos.wordpress.com/2.../lens-mod-faq/
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Mr Duclos means it, did you see the price of a rehoused Tokina 2.8 11-16mm in his site: $3495 and it is back ordered. Considering the actual price($700, magnificient lens btw) it is almost 5x more expensive...
 
Really enjoyed this thread. My 2 cents..... Companies are motivated by money. They would rather sell 100 of these at $45000 than 1000 at $10000 if the net profit is higher on the lower volume.
 
VGurcu said:
Mr Duclos means it, did you see the price of a rehoused Tokina 2.8 11-16mm in his site: $3495 and it is back ordered. Considering the actual price($700, magnificient lens btw) it is almost 5x more expensive...
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And owning one, I can tell you that it is worth every dollar.
 
And owning one, I can tell you that it is worth every dollar.
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I remember you own the tokina 11-16 (in a thread discussing 11-16 versus 16-50) , so did u get the duclos version too, or just let him rehoused the one you had?
 
pigbat said:
Really enjoyed this thread. My 2 cents..... Companies are motivated by money. They would rather sell 100 of these at $45000 than 1000 at $10000 if the net profit is higher on the lower volume.
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Yes, they're motivated by money but they're still subject to market forces. If demand is low, prices will always be high. If costs are high, prices will stay high. If demand is high, cost is low and you set your price high...then there is room for a competitor to enter your market (and they will). So the market tends to stabilize over time and arrive at a "market price," unless there is some fundamental change (sudden expansion of demand, technological advancement to lower cost, etc.).
 
pigbat said:
Really enjoyed this thread. My 2 cents..... Companies are motivated by money. They would rather sell 100 of these at $45000 than 1000 at $10000 if the net profit is higher on the lower volume.
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Well, companies are obviously motivated by money. They kind of have to be. If they're not making profits, they can't continue to develop new products. It's the name of the game.

However, I don't think the price of these lenses ($7000) was motivated by money. It was motivated by stupidity. Nobody is going to buy these. Ziess is much more of a trusted name (arguably better) and their tried-and-true CP2's are almost half the price of the these. For some reason Canon thinks they are the lord and masters of the cinema world now, and can just do whatever they want. They brought the cinema look TO THE MASSES with the DSLRs. THAT is their market. They're not going to be able to walk into hollywood with their $20k (2006 handycam-spec) "cinema" camera and exorbitantly priced lenses and expect to get anywhere. They should have stuck to the market they know, and the market that made their still cameras so popular for video. Pricing these at around $2k each would have been smart. I would buy 3 of them right away. At their current price... I'm planning on buying 0. Do they really think they are going to make enough money in the TINY high-end cinema market? I don't get it.
 
GH2user said:
Well, companies are obviously motivated by money. They kind of have to be. If they're not making profits, they can't continue to develop new products. It's the name of the game.

However, I don't think the price of these lenses ($7000) was motivated by money. It was motivated by stupidity. Nobody is going to buy these. Ziess is much more of a trusted name (arguably better) and their tried-and-true CP2's are almost half the price of the these. For some reason Canon thinks they are the lord and masters of the cinema world now, and can just do whatever they want. They brought the cinema look TO THE MASSES with the DSLRs. THAT is their market. They're not going to be able to walk into hollywood with their $20k (2006 handycam-spec) "cinema" camera and exorbitantly priced lenses and expect to get anywhere. They should have stuck to the market they know, and the market that made their still cameras so popular for video. Pricing these at around $2k each would have been smart. I would buy 3 of them right away. At their current price... I'm planning on buying 0. Do they really think they are going to make enough money in the TINY high-end cinema market? I don't get it.
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OK show me ONE 24mm T1.5 cine lens that covers full frame. There are none- ZERO
I think that makes it unique and special- don't you?
Oops my bad- there is one CANON K-35 from the '70s So really their competition is their own vintage..
 
GH2user said:
However, I don't think the price of these lenses ($7000) was motivated by money. It was motivated by stupidity. Nobody is going to buy these. Ziess is much more of a trusted name (arguably better) and their tried-and-true CP2's are almost half the price of the these. For some reason Canon thinks they are the lord and masters of the cinema world now, and can just do whatever they want. They brought the cinema look TO THE MASSES with the DSLRs. THAT is their market. They're not going to be able to walk into hollywood with their $20k (2006 handycam-spec) "cinema" camera and exorbitantly priced lenses and expect to get anywhere. They should have stuck to the market they know, and the market that made their still cameras so popular for video. Pricing these at around $2k each would have been smart. I would buy 3 of them right away. At their current price... I'm planning on buying 0. Do they really think they are going to make enough money in the TINY high-end cinema market? I don't get it.
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I think you're just not use to this higher end market and this super high end equipment. These prices are all normal. Canon's price isn't unusual or indicative of a lord or master of the cinema world. Browse through these prices of pro lenses at B&H: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/buy/Lenses/ci/1884/N/4292338124

Some of the Zeiss Digiprimes (for 2/3" no less) are $15K each. HD ENG servo lenses cost $25K each (more than the C300 alone). There's one Fujinon 87X box lens for $160K.

The CP2 are much slower than the Canon Cine Primes (sometimes 2 stops slower). It's not realistic to compare a T1.5 and T2.9 and say they should be the same price or the faster one be $2K. Heck, the still photo lens of the same speed already cost $1500.

$20K also isn't really all that much money compared to these XDCam and P2 cameras:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?Ns=p_PRICE_2|1&ci=1881&N=4256818814&srtclk=sort
http://catalog2.panasonic.com/webap...toreId=11201&catalogId=13051&catGroupId=34401
 
Piolet said:
$20K also isn't really all that much money compared to these XDCam and P2 cameras:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?Ns=p_PRICE_2|1&ci=1881&N=4256818814&srtclk=sort
http://catalog2.panasonic.com/webap...toreId=11201&catalogId=13051&catGroupId=34401
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But it is compared to DLSR and the XF series... which all come in under $4k.

Look, the C300 takes great looking footage. But it's clearly a mark-up. I don't understand why people are defending them so much. If you can afford one (and are a mediocre DP or director that never has a vision for anything over 24p)... then by all means, go ahead and get one. But you can still be vocal about the obvious marking up they're doing.

Oh BTW, save this post. I'm predicting that the next-gen "amateur" slander (like shallow DOF) is going to be over-cranking. In a few months when the glorious C300 hits the streets there's going to be nothing but talk about how "slo-motion" is for hack Micheal Bay wannabees... and statements like "over-cranking is just a cheap trick that armatures use to hide their lack of skill". Sound familiar? (Hint: it's the same thing that happened to DOF.)
 
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GH2user said:
If you can afford one (and are a mediocre DP or director that never has a vision for anything over 24p)...
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... This is basically just elitism in the other direction. No matter what camera comes out you would still be basically hanging over the GH2. "It's 4 grand cheaper than the FS100 and does everything better! Better compression, better aliasing, better better better!"
 
pigbat said:
Really enjoyed this thread. My 2 cents..... Companies are motivated by money. They would rather sell 100 of these at $45000 than 1000 at $10000 if the net profit is higher on the lower volume.
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No. RED made Scarlet so people who can't afford EPIC can have RED camera too. That's how much Jim cares about the customers.
 
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