Barry_Green
Moderator
Well, I suppose the logical reason would be that DigiOptical could have been OEM'img them for Red. And when Red discontinued them, DigiOptical decided to sell them directly, and without Red's necessary markup in there, they can obviously offer them for less. And why are they cheap? Because they're not really all that good, which is why Red discontinued the 18-50 and instead developed the RPP 17-50. By all reports they had pretty good glass, but lousy mechanicals and variable build quality. Which doesn't make them bad, instead it makes them quite a value if you can live with the less-than-cinema-standard mechanicals. Try to get a Zeiss LWZ (which is 15-45, so pretty comparable focal range) and you'll pay many, many times the cost. So as long as the glass is good and the mechanicals are usable, they still represent quite a value.
As far as I know Red has said they're not associated with the DigiOptical company, but I think anyone who has used both has said that they're identical so the assumption (and it is only an assumption!) that DigiOptical was the manufacturer for Red, seems reasonable. Or, we can take it a step further -- maybe there's another manufacturer, and Red had an exclusive deal with that manufacturer for, what, three years? And now that the exclusive deal is up, now the real manufacturer is free to sell to others and DigiOptical is buying those lenses from that manufacturer and selling them under their brand. That would be a way where the lenses could be identical, yet Red's statement of "we have nothing to do with DigiOptical" could also be true.
Or maybe DigiOptical is just manufacturing a knockoff/ripoff of the Red lens, like most of the CineCity products are knockoffs of other manufacturers' products. But with that "made in the UK" label, that seems less likely, and HeavyG will be able to tell us in short order whether the lens is a quality unit or a knockoff.
