No One Making New Lenses?

[Jim Fitzgerald]

So as Matt Stage indicated earlier my friend and fellow photographer Tri Tran has developed a new lens for US, the large format photographers. No kickstarter or funding requests. He did this on his own dime. Many of you know Tri has been an avid collector for years and may have even purchased a lens from him. Remember the one of a kind 27" Cooke Portrait lens? Tri owned and used this lens for years along with many others. He took his knowledge in optics design and photographic soft focus lenses and designed and built an amazing lens. We have lenses that are being made to order and are very reasonably priced. With the new technology and Tri's expertise he has designed a lens that rivals the Struss pictorial, Pinkham and Smith, Spencer Portland and others. These are available to order now! If you stop the lenses down they are very sharp as well. You can add a Copal 3 shutter to them but it seems to be best with the shorter focal lengths. This should be a future collectable lens like the Struss is now. The Struss lenses are going for what $4,000-$10,000 if you can find them? Our longest lens which is 30" and covers 20x24 is $2,620.00 plus shipping. Images have been posted and take a look at the link and if you are serious about a lens let us know. Thanks.

https://www.tritranphotography.com/tt-signature-lens

[Corran]

"Very reasonably priced" is a bit subjective. The soft-focus lens market, especially for large and cult lenses, seems extremely distorted to me.

[Amedeus]

We looked at this and played with this and the issues are a combination of speed, 100% light cut-off, the insertion loss, electronics complexity and economics. You can get 2 out of 5 right easily but 3 out of 5 puts you out of the market.

We equally looked at a Copal 0, 1 and 3 redesign with all the required tooling and that was considered not economical feasible under the current market demand.

Cheers,

Imagine a new way of doing this (as a solution with no moving parts):

The shutter consist of an electronic shutter sandwiched between two coated glass plates.

The shutter are opague when closed and translucent when open.

Aperature consists of a number of concentric circles either opague or translucent.

The shutter are mounted in a standard Copal 0, 1 or 3 form factor, containing powersuply and control electronics.

The major problem would be production cost and time for switching between translucent and opague.


Regarding the old electronic shutters (compur ect.) the problem was, that only the shutter timing was electronicaly controlled, using discrete components with a limited lifetime.
The rest ot the shutter was still mecanical.