Video trends are unpredictable and goes in a waves, so you never know... Some lenses such as Canon 50/0.95 aren’t that popular among film makers recently, but if someone use it for a viral video, prices can rocket up over night. (despite its only one of a kind).
Commercial video production has usually much bigger budgets than photo production in comparison. Equipment rental, especially lenses are a very small part of the budget, so generally, prices of a pro video-equipment are much higher. These lenses are supposed to stand some serious abuse, both in the sturdiness and reliability. It’s a different world.
Dipping a toe in that world I start to understand that even a small demand from that side influences our market. And the goal is, as for most of us here, the lens character.
For example the articles here:
https://thecinelens.com
Way higher prices in that market, companies buying old cine + comparable still lenses, glass rehoused or cine modified and then rented out.
The trend waves will give some fluctuations in price per lens model but with rental companies in between purchase/modification and actual use I doubt it will be much, the trends will dampen out on the rental companies stock shelves.
Count to that the larger cine sensors being used now, I expect that this effect is not going to disappear. 8K sensors showing even more character of a 1970 cine lens design, there is some irony in it.
In 2016 Cooke brought out new "vintage" glass in a modern cine housing. That will not change the effect for us here with Cooke's prices. Chinese new cine lens ranges might when some report that the look of one range is similar enough to that of a vintage range. NiSi full frame cine lenses (2018) pages refer to a retro cinematic look .......
Couldn't the escalating prices in Canon's be related to Sumire? Canon did catch up with the release of that line in 2019.
Possibly. In this review there is a comment on the lack of available focal lengths in all Canon Cine ranges as I understand it;
https://www.newsshooter.com/2019/04/03/canon-sumire-primes-a-modern-day-k-35/
I really don't shoot video so I can't say much about the ranges. The questions that arises is what is objective criteria to rate lower contrast lenses. It's evident that the camp saying it's collectors or nostalgia is wrong.
It also hints there are metrics yet to be discovered to really be able to characterize lenses. It's like food, where we have very little, other than people we know to have exquisite taste, or chefs with exquisite techniques, process and sources.
Take Francis Mallman, he ended up #1 I don't recall in which year, I think it may have been held in Germany or Denmark in the 80s, and he mostly cooked with Potatoes brought from Argentina.
Before being the highest rated cheff in that competition, by judges and also popular choice, he was almost disqualified. People though he was disrespecting the institution when he presented his Potato-full menu. He had sneaked in the Potatoes from Argentina in regular luggage too.
It relates with the comment in the sense that what he cooked was extremely delicious and delicate. However, Potatoes are just a root that's so easy to grow and so abundant and cheap. It also has some other unique characteristics, and he mixed them in unique ways. Likewise, a simpler optic crafted very well, with very well crafted balance of aberrations, in the right hands, may produce things you simply can't achieve at all with the ultra high contrast lenses. No post processing or flavoring after the fact can give you the end outcome.
But we have no objective way to measure in which vectors or ways it is superior. I think often we hear:
- Smoother transitions
- Beautiful bokeh
- Charming color tones
- Flattering skin tones
- Medium Contrast
Let's only "Smoother transitions".
!!!
Sanity warning, complicated language ahead, almost unintelligible. It makes sense to me because I am picturing it, but don't know how to explain it better. You likely want to not read any of it.
This requires a PSF that looks like a gradient. Can be apodized, which is an optical darkening of the faster apertures, so one is actually blending a faster aperture with a smaller one, weighting more of the image towards the stopped down apertures. The second one is though infinite ways to make the lens focus at different Focal Lengths, ideally close and clumped to a center value. But to have smooth bokeh, it means the lens should have a peak focus that is more abrupt the slide down gently. That is, say in a numerical hypothetical example, maybe 50% if the circle focuses at certain distance, then 25% a little further down, then maybe 15% even more down, then 7% and so on. I think that when the lens is close or fully APO, it can only do so in one way, and the characteristic of images may be largely similar in any image. But often, in old lenses, they would not try to go in the Apo direction, because it seems it made it very difficult to make the lens produce this smooth transition. Apo happens in a plane, what happens after or before is what is sacrificed. So a lot of the lenses that seems to have a more appealing rendering to cineasts seem to have more LoCA. This means depending on local, one can naturally be rendering different wavelengths at different focal lengths. This also has the effect or is similar to saying that different colors have different planes of focus at any focusing distance. So one can have red be very well focused, sharp, along with frequencies close to red, with green more defocused, so when taken together, the resulting colors on different objects would be quite different depending on the source wavelengths it reflects, as small detail is mixed up very differently between lenses that do this differently.
All this is said, likely, will not make sense to anyone. It seems convoluted while for me it's clear what I mean. Really, maybe it just imagining that every picture is made up of overlapping tiny circles. Like out brush it 50,000 little colored circles. The circles range from small to very big. When they are smallest they can, we call it to be in focus. So LoCA makes it so that when one circle is very small, another circle in the same position representing some other wavelength is bigger. And say, a little behind this focal plane, there's another set of circles, where now the circle that was smaller now is growing a bit bigger, and the other actually shrunk a bit. Then a tile bit more behind, both circles are a bit bigger. How fast do these circles grow the more we move behind the focal plane? That will depend (give same aperture) on the mix of LoCA (multiple focus points and spreads by wavelength) but also if the glass is focusing part of the light behind the subject, which may be some of the spherical aberrations (which don't need to arise from spherical surfaces to be measured). In this case, in the best focus point of the wavelength, we have little circles that are a bit bigger than we could. Say we only have red, and focus on a target, then make the smallest red circles possible. If the lens focuses on multiple focal planes, then what proportion is focused where? When I read undercorrected spherical aberration, it means it rapidly comes to the smallest circle possible, then the circles remain smaller than normal as we look at points behind the focal point, so it is a bit less sharp at the max point of sharpness, then the focus degrades more slowly, bu after some point the proportion behind focused at a longer FL goes to 0. From this point it becomes as blurry as any other lens. But the passage is made flatter and not peak in an abrupt way. In reality, we can imagine this as tiny circles. The corrected lens gives a very small circle, then gradually becomes bigger. Another lens may have a mix: a proportion that is the smallest right there, but some rays there are focused behind...basically, at the focal plane, some points of the same wavelength are in focus and some a bit blurry. This lower contrast but isn't lowering resolution. And with a matching sensor, this may even resolve the problem with aliasing, moire and other very damaging artifacts.
Combine then circles or different colors and sizes, across the z plane (or away from the focal point), with the glass in part focusing any color at more than one FL in a specific "recipe" (proportion or distribution vs focal plane) and then add that this varies by wavelength, which then once this concepts are clear (able to be visualized) then it starts to show how things that at a macro level look rather similar (same pic with two lenses) the actual working, colors, evolution of the focus in the out of focus areas is often so radically different.
When this is understood, then tests like MTF, as a mesure of how good a lens is, is almost like treating a weight to evaluate food. One food weights 1 kg, and another 800 grams. This tells us very little about the food, other than probably it is less dense. Likewise, contrast tells us very little about a lens. It's even worst, an Apo lens that shows 99% contrast in 20 lp/mm across some width just tells us all the circles peak in unison in one focus plane, then degrade (defocus) in a likewise fashion, where it may be a bit different how fast the circles get by wavelength, they are all going to look much like each other. One may want such a lens because is using a 200 MP camera.
This is why I think it seems crazy that we have almost no information to understand why we like some rendering. And it is also hilarious that since different lenses are non-apo in very different ways, they will do very different details depending on which combinations of of wavelengths are in the small detail subject of our picture. A lens may do an amazing pic in one subject and look unrefined and meh in another object of very different combinations of colors in the small detail.
This is also why i absolutely love Jim Kasson's analysis of some "Apo" lenses, here the measures the contrast BY COLOR for at least the RGB buckets (which is what we can sense with Bayer) across the depth plane. It tells a huge lot more than any MTF. And I also adore some Zeiss white papers, that show the MTF by wavelegth for sometimes 2 of them, sometimes 3 of them. Unfortunately, these last say absolutely nothing about contrast in the Z plane, but at least one knows that when contrast is 70% somewhere, a 30% of light is nearby, possibly poorly focused, or behind or ahead of the subject, or biased and not circular. So when I see 70% contrast, I don't think it's a bad lens. Actually, it has all the potential to be amaing, or really a horrible lens depending on exactly what is going with the 30% not in the place and focus plane. Increasing this lens contrast may be making the lens better, or poorer. It's just impossible to tell. The only thing we'd know is that its more contrasty without any uncertainty.
Maybe there could be way to explain many things in optics with overlapping circles ideagrams, in a way that little has to be said and it becomes more self evident. I am pretty sure the wording and most of the text fails to make much sense, as I am not recalling knowledge, but but a way in which to think about what the lens actually does in practice and the effects it has on details.
Is the Sumire lens worth $7000? I have no way to tell, and we have no way to characterize it, other than seeing if we enjoy the images or not, but without being able to say if they were enhaced or degraded by the lens. And this also makes comparisons, and statement s about how good or bad, or how overpriced or what a bargain a purely subjective, perceptual and emotional affair. But what is real is that the lens maker could have done things 1000 different ways and have the same contrast with infinite other ways to affect the blur circles over z-plane and across wavelengths. So at least a lens and optical designer must be a scientists, but also have a very refined taste, goal and a way to know all these details we likely don't get to understand.
