How old is this video? I gather that most lenses are assembled by robots these days. They can measure the centers and align them accurately on the fly. That's why photogrammeters, who need very precise lenses for extracting measurements, can use cheaper cameras than they used to.

That's definitely a really cool video, but it only explains normal lenses (one focal length). I want to know how they make telephoto lenses, and how it focuses.

thanks for not tagging this PMA

Hey thats "how it's made" from Canada. I mean it's not like I always watch it, but hey, It's Canadian!

Wow I love these "How things are made" videos. I would have thought the etching and polishing would have also been done by robots too.

You said this video didnt contain sex scenes...

@ab3: Or explosions. I exploded....

This is really cool but seems so unnefective..

I mean there`s a LOT of things that can go wrong....

Is the voice Mrs. Tom Cruise #1?

I saw a long time on the show "How It's Made" on the Science Channel. It's a good series.

I didn't know pitch was used for other than working with metals. It's basically just a glob of tar and smells like fresh asphalt and used for chasing and repousse work.

holy crap! 6 weeks for 1 lense. I'm never gonna get mine for my 40D by valentines. haha. this video gotta be from the 80's or something.

yeah i mean even the etching of the specs on the lens was done by hand, i'm sure it's all automated these days

I just watch "How It's Made" for stuff like this, that and it takes a bit of effort to get sound working for me.

Wow, with 60 or so million digital cameras to sell in a year, I bet companies are glad they don't make lenses that way anymore

@FThorn: No that was Tom in fact.

@lafond66:
You mean, this shows how they make primes (fixed focal length), and you're interested in how they make zooms (variable focal lengths). A "normal" lens is one which provides a perspective about equal to the human eye; 50mm is considered normal in 35mm photography. A telephoto lens is one with a a focal length longer than the normal focal length, and a wide angle lens is one with a shorter focal length. For example, a 100mm lens is a telephoto, 70-300mm is a telephoto zoom, 24mm is wide angle, and 15-30mm is a wide angle zoom.

Forgive me for noticing, but every camera lens I've ever had was made in Japan. The video says these are "television lenses," so maybe the situation is different there, but just as everyone else asks, just when was this video made?

Video cameras like the big ones reporters use, use similar lenses to SLR still cameras. The studio camera lenses are a bit beefier, and housed in a box. The lens they make in that video seems really small, it reminds me of lenses for telescopes more than cameras, but they say it's for television.

No wonder camera lenses are so expensive.

I thought this was from the Lensman series!

Oops, sorry. Thought I was on io9 there for a sec.

@bRod: I work in the super high end optics field, and while I can't really get into it, the lenses being made in this video aren't being made using an outdated process.

Maybe Canon and Nikon assemble some lenses with robots, but currently humans do better work since there are a lot of judgement calls to make when assembling a system of lenses.

The clear glue they use to stick two lenses on top of each other is Norland NOA61, which has the same index of refraction as glass, meaning if you bond two pieces of glass together with it, there's no distortion at the interface.

This is from "How It's Made," series #8, program #4 on the Canadian arm of Discovery Channel. (Not sure if it's shown in other countries.) The narrator in series #8 was Lynne Adams. Anyhoo, these videos were made from the early 2000s onwards, IIRC. Series #8 was one of the more recent ones, so it's probably from around, oh, 2004, 2005 or so. The place where this episode was filmed was JML Optical Industries in Rochester, New York, USA. You can still see images of actual human beings making these lenses on JML's home page at www.jmloptical.com.

And for those of you who think that "robots do it all nowadays," there's a video on the InterWeb from 2007 of one of the major camera makers' newest models being assembled mostly by humans someplace in Southeast Asia. Humans are still better than robots at lots of things requiring judgment and a deft touch...

And yes, that is why lenses cost so much.

Never again will I question the price of good glass.

Here's a detailed set of videos detailing the production of a Canon EF 500mm f/4 L IS USM, all the way from mixing raw ingredients for the glass to final assembly and testing.

[www.canon.com]

@GarthWood: What the hell? Do you have every single episode of How it's Made on dvd or something? I want!

Nope. Just recognized the camerawork and the voice-over. The remaining details were pulled off of the production company's website or from my own hazy memory (the seasons and episodes are undated on the website, but I recall some of the copyright dates from the actual shows, and guessed the approximate date of this one).

If you were so inclined, I imagine you could find at least some of this stuff on bittorrent or somesuch.

@GarthWood: I knew this video wasn't THAT old. You can tell just by watching it that it isn't more than 10 years old. For a minute I thought they were completely ripping off Discovery's "How it's Made" since all the episodes here in the US have a male voiceover.

Just like with any product, there are cheaper things made by machines and then there are better, more expensive things made by hand. This is an example of the latter.

I'm amazed that Optical Glue Lady wasn't wearing a hair net...

Yep.

I own a (now relatively old -- mid-Eighties!) Olympus OM-System lens, the 250/2.0, which was completely assembled by hand. Rumour has it that each lens took a year to create from start to finish. At the time, its price reflected that care and attention -- it sold at B&H Photo in New York City for, IIRC, approx. $11,000.00 U.S. (list was somewhere north of $17K U.S.).

Needless to say, I didn't buy my copy new. 8^>

No sex in the video, eh? That's not what Cooper Lawrence told me.

I watch this video every time I'm preparing to drop $500-$1000 on a lens. It makes it seem almost like a bargain. :)

Whoever organised this assembly is insane and should have been fired, I can't believe ANY factory at ANY time did things so slow laborious and inefficient, not even at european government agencies you'd see this level of wasted time.
I mean common, not even Leica was every this bad.

Wow! now i know why all my lenses costed so much!

Thanks for spending 6 weeks just for 300 bucks!