Commissionned new lenses, foolish ?

[Michael Kadillak]

Foolish? - no. Complicated? Absolutely. If it were easy we would already be making images with these optics.

IMO the first rule is to clearly define one's objective and see if it still holds water. The way I am approaching my project to bring a ULF lens into the market means that it must meet or exceed the following criteria (in no particular order): Affordable, at least 95 degrees of coverage, correctly balanced for optical aberrations, performance and resolution, screw straight into a modern shutter and at least single coated.

I have seen many give it a good shot before walking away as I did with my first attempts at this project and I learned a tremendous amount in the process. A while back I re-grouped and reformulated a much more skilled and tactful business plan that I feel has an excellent chance of bearing fruit. I will tell you first hand that contacting a major lens manufacturer will only get you a go away price that will blow your mind. Been there and done that enough times to figure it out.

Sometime in the first quarter of 2007 I should have a go/no go answer to the business objective for a highly desirable ULF lens. Clearly like many of you I feel that the market is ripe for this product. At this time I will just keep plugging away and see where we get. Rest assured that I am engaging the correct technical skill sets to assist in this extremely complicated process but we will turn over every stone necessary to bring this project to fruition.

Anyone wants to give this a go on their own - by all means have at it. We can compare notes later.

Cheers!

[Bill_1856]

Bah! Humbug!

[Dave_B]

Folks:
In my opinion, any effort of a novice to reproduce the results of thousands of person-years of real world experience in building lenses with some book learning and computer code is likely to be an expensive failure. Lenses are very complicated technology. There are many, many details that spell the difference between a work of art and garbage. For example, the "simple" issue of AR coatings is very complicated with issues like sticking layers, changes in the index of refraction as the layers get deposited, wear layers, chemical stability, dispersion where the index of refraction changes with wavelength, etc. I have designed and built optical systems for a living and one finds that like any manufacturing process, the first few or few hundred or few thousand are crap while one works out the bugs and gets the hundreds of processes locked in and reliable. Which of your colleagues will want the dogs that you made while you were trying to get to the good stuff? The first one of anything complicated costs millions of dollars to build. The right kind of glass with low dispersion and low changes in index with temperature, good mechanical and chemical stability, uniformity of compostion, cutting and polishing, AR layers, low thermal expansion housings, low stress mounts, design of the housings to reduce flare, inside coatings of the housing to appear black, glues, the list of complicated technologies in lens building is quite long.

As an example, think about the recent sad story of a currently active commercial LF lens maker. Clearly they have a small army of very smart people who have spent their entire lives doing this and their firm has done this for a hundred years. They are now recalling lots of very expensive lenses because the glue or the AR coating or the inside paint or some oils on the shutters or something else, who knows what, is causing their lenses to fog. You're going to beat these folks in your spare time? My advice, buy what you want on ebay and take some pictures.
Cheers,
Dave B.

[Mark Sampson]

Douglas Busch did this about 25 years back and lost funding, I believe, before more than a few lenses were made. They were called 'De Golden Busch" and were a collaboration with Rodenstock and Melles Griot. This information came from an article in "View Camera", or maybe LensWork; and is based on my faulty memory. But anyone really interested in this idea should contact Mr. Busch; I believe he still has a website.

[Michael Kadillak]

Folks:
In my opinion, any effort of a novice to reproduce the results of thousands of person-years of real world experience in building lenses with some book learning and computer code is likely to be an expensive failure. Lenses are very complicated technology. There are many, many details that spell the difference between a work of art and garbage. For example, the "simple" issue of AR coatings is very complicated with issues like sticking layers, changes in the index of refraction as the layers get deposited, wear layers, chemical stability, dispersion where the index of refraction changes with wavelength, etc. I have designed and built optical systems for a living and one finds that like any manufacturing process, the first few or few hundred or few thousand are crap while one works out the bugs and gets the hundreds of processes locked in and reliable. Which of your colleagues will want the dogs that you made while you were trying to get to the good stuff? The first one of anything complicated costs millions of dollars to build. The right kind of glass with low dispersion and low changes in index with temperature, good mechanical and chemical stability, uniformity of compostion, cutting and polishing, AR layers, low thermal expansion housings, low stress mounts, design of the housings to reduce flare, inside coatings of the housing to appear black, glues, the list of complicated technologies in lens building is quite long.

As an example, think about the recent sad story of a currently active commercial LF lens maker. Clearly they have a small army of very smart people who have spent their entire lives doing this and their firm has done this for a hundred years. They are now recalling lots of very expensive lenses because the glue or the AR coating or the inside paint or some oils on the shutters or something else, who knows what, is causing their lenses to fog. You're going to beat these folks in your spare time? My advice, buy what you want on ebay and take some pictures.
Cheers,
Dave B.

So in other words, why ever try?

In a pragnatic world when one defines their variables and engages positive thinkers with the correct experience, I see no reason that some very specific voids in the ULF optical arena could not be fulfilled. Do we need to enlarge to 10x? NO. Would we have 125 years of reputation to preserve? No. Do we have thousands of employees worldwide to finance with a myriad of employment benefits and corporate overhead? No. Is the infrastructure present to accomplish said objective? absolutely. It is about how you approach the process.

If the conventional lens makers are not going to sequester this need then we have no choice but to give it a go as I am doing. I make a great living doing what my competition say cannot be done. I will leave it at that.

You can come up with 20 reasons why it is impossible. I only need one to proceed - we need it.

Cheers!

[Dave_B]

If by some modern miracle you did manage to reproduce the thousands of person years of experience that the modern, big lens manufacturers have accumulated and could build lenses that others would buy, you will be guaranteed to have violated a large number of patents that cover all the viable ways to build modern lens systems. The big lens makers spend a lot of money to develop new technologies in their core, cash cow businesses and then patent the IP so that their competitors (you, maybe) can't compete with them. They typically patent the best ways to do things and then the other ways that are close so that others can't compete or even get close with other products. It's called a patent picket fence. They then hire people to agressively protect their rights. Patents are like dogs. The people who own them get mad when someone else steals them and they tend to take legal action to recover their property. What they will do is at some point realize that you are not a company with deep pockets but an individual with limited means and will then bury you with paper that you will need to hire someone costing $300/hour to deal with and respond to. They will make a lesson of you and make sure others know what will happen to them if they ever try the same thing as you. It is the same thing as would happen if you decided that you and a group of friends were going to build cars to compete with Detroit. They would sit tight, watch you spend money and time and at the moment when your expenses were at a maximum and revenues just beginning, they would hammer you. Did you miss what happened with the Blackberry IP lawsuit? It was brutal. There is an army of lawyers in this country who do that for a living, protecting the IP rights of big companies in well-established businesses and they earn a good living. I repeat, if your interest is photography, buy what you want on Ebay and take some pictures.
Cheers,
Dave B.

[Kerry L. Thalmann]

If by some modern miracle you did manage to reproduce the thousands of person years of experience that the modern, big lens manufacturers have accumulated and could build lenses that others would buy, you will be guaranteed to have violated a large number of patents that cover all the viable ways to build modern lens systems.

Dave,

You incorrectly assume any new ULF lens would have to be a "modern lens system". Patents have a finite life (typically 17 - 25 years depending on the type of patent, when it was issued and in which country it was issued). There are plenty of perfectly good classic lens designs (tessar type, dagor type, dialyte, wide field guass, plasmat, etc.) whose patents expired decades ago that would be perfectly suitable for a new ULF lens design. In fact, it was two of these classic designs Schneider turned to (Dagor type double anastigmat dating to 1893 and dialyte or artar/celor type dating to 1904) for their recent Super Symmar XXL Fine Art ULF lenses - and this is Schneider who has access to much newer propietary designs. No sense in reinventing the wheel when the old round one still works fine.

Large format lenses, especially those with enough coverage for ULF use, evolve slowly. Unlike lenses for digital photography or smaller film formats, new product introductions are rare and often spaced several years, or even decades apart. Borrowing from existing designs once patents expire is also very common in this slow to change market. The Zeiss Tessar is the most copied lens design in history. Every major lens manufacturer at some point offered their own Tessar clones. Tessar types have been produced for all formats from subminiture through 20x24. And all of these copise were perfectly legal as they didn't go into production until after the original Zeiss Tessar patent expired around 1920. In LF lenses alone, the Kodak Commercial Ektars, the Schneider Xenars, the Fujinon L series, the Nikkor M series, and several more are Tessar clones. Since the mid-1950s, most LF lens manufacturers main product lines (Schneider Symmar, Rodenstock Sironar, Fujinon W and Nikkor W) have been based on Paul Rudolph's plasmat design. Again, not a problem as the plasmat patent expired before these lenses went into production.

Pesonally, I applaud Michael's effort. With ancient, uncoated lenses capable of covering ULF formats selling for record prices on eBay, he sees a market niche in need of filling. Schneider's new 550mm and 1100mm Fine Art XXL lenses are great, but their market appeal is limited. Not everybody can afford $5000+ for a new lens, not everybody needs a 900mm image circle and not everybody has enough bellows to focus an 1100mm lens. There is plenty of room for more affordable alternatives with more modest, but sill usable image cirlce requirements in a variety of focal lengths.

Thanks to the ULF special order film programs from Kodak and Ilford and J&Cs continued commitment to supplying a variety of affordable ULF emulsions, the ULF market is growing. With cameras, film and film holders availalble from multiple manufacturers, it's only natural that there would also be a need for lenses to cover these formats as well.

Kerry

[Christopher Perez]

I took an intellectual look at this. I thought about it, researched it, and poked around a bit in the market to see what I could turn up. I even know a few people who work in the industry in various capacities who I chatted up about this kind of effort. All the while I was thinking how great it would be to come up with two or three lines of optics that met the special needs of ULF. I have just enough optical physics background to be dangerous, so the whole thing seemed closer to "doable" than not.

Without going through all the mental gymnastics, here are a few approaches that I ended up with before I called it a day...

One - Go into business yourself. Required an optics facility, of which there are plenty languishing here in the USA. For a mere $100k, you could get an entire plant ready to grind/machine your own optics. Glass would need to come from China in raw chunks (for best price - and you should hear how upset certain three letter agencies are that none can be sourced in the West for reasonable prices!). Hire someone to do the optical design (if you don't have the talent yourself or the software package that can help make the magic happen). Payroll for the manpower easily cleared $200k/year. Alas, the costs of both "soft" and "hard" consumables were show-stoppers for me. Not enough financial depth to pull it off. But it IS do-able. If a person had $500k to throw at the challenge, I think some form of operation could get off the ground. A person could control their own optical destiny.

Two - Take a close look at classic lens designs, grab an optics software design package (of which there are more than several good ones), take into consideration the new none-lead glass, and re-formulate a few good optics. Then send the designs off to a fabricator. There are several here in the USA just waiting to take your orders. They'll even machine the metal parts to your spec. Just give them the right file format with embedded instructions, and you could have as many new lenses, fully coated, as you can afford. The costs of doing this are not cheap. But if you're seriously interested, one place to start is Edmond Scientific's Optics Group (or whatever they're actually called). I think it's possible to drop less than $50k and have something to show for the effort. All that'd be left is the marketing and sales. I wasn't sure how well it would work out going to "outside" suppliers who built to spec, but it certainly was an attractive approach.

Three - If you don't have background in optics, but still want to turn out some lenses for your ULF, let the optics fabricators do the design, glass prep, and machining for you. This will be even more expensive than #Two. But, as with all these approaches, it is entirely "do-able". You just need the financial resources to pull it off. I figured, depending on who you engaged and how much time they needed to spend on optical design, a person probably needs $100k to $200k to have something to show for their efforts. As with #two, all that'd be left to do would be marketing and sales. Oh, and a person would still be at the mercy of "outside" contractors.

Four - This is the approach I've settled on. Mainly because I quickly realized for myself that there aren't enough hours in the day for me to pursue something like building my own lenses when what I really want is just to go out and make a few images. So instead, I have procured old lenses that meet my need. For my own needs, issues like single vs. multi-coatings don't matter. In fact, some of the images I'm most pleased with came from uncoated optics. Those images are still very sharp and contrasty in ULF. Yes, shutters can be a little dodgy. But that's why we have Carol Miller at Flutot's Camera Repair.

Anyways, that's my lens builders saga. I'm sticking to my story.

Still, I envy those who have the time and financial resources to pull off this kind of venture...

[Dave_B]

Kerry:
As I said in an earlier post, I have built optical systems for a living in the past. I have a Ph.D in physics from a top school and have worked in this field for more than thirty years. I have more than sixty patents myself in optical systems and understand the technology in some detail. Decent lenses with even a few elements are quite complicated beasts. You as an expert on classic lenses know this well.

As an example, the fixtures for mounting the lenses with more than one optical element require optical measuring systems to get things even close to being good enough to take a decent picture. Old lens makers used a lot of tricks to do this that died with them. New lens makers use expensive technology. A person new to the field is unlikely to be able to do either.

As far as patents are concerned, most of the patents are not in the glass design or lens shape. Things like modern AR coating systems, glues, mounts, low reflection paints for the inside of the housings, etc. are all needed to build anything like a viable lens system you could sell. Wax and lampblack are poor technologies to base a new business on. Modern, low dispersion glasses are also still likely to be under patent coverage as well.

I would like as much as the next guy to get wonderful lenses for a bargain price. I have spent a lot of money on lenses and would love to get them for less. If Michael can pull this off, i will be the first one in line to buy one and offer him an apology along with the check. However, I think it very unlikely that he will make lenses, starting from scratch, that you would ever use for your photography. I just know from personal experience how hard it is to make something as simple as a decent multi-element lens system, especially if you can't use any of the off the shelf technologies that you can buy but others still own the IP for.
Best wishes,
Dave B.

[Michael Kadillak]

Thanks Kerry. I was invisioning the same line of counter rational to respond to Dave B. but you beat me to it and did an outstanding job. I thank you.

In business and life there will always be the naysayers to anything that one aspires to and over the years I have become acclimated to their style. Rather then offer positive elements to overcoming any issues that are obvious (particularly to someone within the industry) it is easier to default to fear. Such is life.....

No thanks. I would rather subscribe to optimism and connecting wants and needs particularly when it relates to my passion in LF/ULF photography. When you find the right experienced people that think alike THINGS HAPPEN.

I thrive on being told it cannot be done.

Cheers!