<![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008 - Gizmodo Comments]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008 - Gizmodo Comments]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> Wow! now i know why all my lenses costed so much!

Thanks for spending 6 weeks just for 300 bucks!

alin0steglinski

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> 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.

Wwhat

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> I watch this video every time I'm preparing to drop $500-$1000 on a lens. It makes it seem almost like a bargain. :)

ppiddy

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> No sex in the video, eh? That's not what Cooper Lawrence told me.

poppy

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> 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^>

GarthWood

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> I'm amazed that Optical Glue Lady wasn't wearing a hair net...

JHHNY

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> @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.

GumbyJump

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> 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

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> @GarthWood: What the hell? Do you have every single episode of How it's Made on dvd or something? I want!

impliedsurprise

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> 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]

DirkusMaximus

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> Never again will I question the price of good glass.

acutusnothus

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> 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.

GarthWood

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> 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.

Canadian Impostor

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> @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.

Canadian Impostor

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> I thought this was from the Lensman series!

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

strider_mt2k

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> No wonder camera lenses are so expensive.

mikecoscia

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> 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.

lafond66

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> 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?

jimothy

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> @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.

jimothy

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> @FThorn: No that was Tom in fact.

mikegriffin

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> 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

TailsNZ

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> 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.

myotheralt

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> 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

ned flanders

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> 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.

sdsviet

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> 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.

poisonfist

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> I saw a long time on the show "How It's Made" on the Science Channel. It's a good series.

mag2005

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> Is the voice Mrs. Tom Cruise #1?

FThorn

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> This is really cool but seems so unnefective..

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

TallDudeFromBrazil

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> @ab3: Or explosions. I exploded....

Mandatory_Field

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> You said this video didnt contain sex scenes...

ab3

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> 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.

Justapspfan

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> Hey thats "how it's made" from Canada. I mean it's not like I always watch it, but hey, It's Canadian!

Nerdzo

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> thanks for not tagging this PMA

matto

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> 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.

lafond66

]]> <![CDATA[How Camera Lenses Are Made: In Honor of PMA 2008]]> 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.

kaleberg

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