Sanjin Jukic
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LEICA Summilux-C™ lenses.
Ex-Panavision lens engineer designed Leica Summilux-C lenses
Finally we have got a full story about making Leica Summilux-C lenses.
Interesting thing is that optical designer is the same guy who was involved in design of
Panavision Primo Series lenses, a man from Scotland Iain Neil who is an international,
multi-talented optical designer, currently living in Lugano, Switzerland.
After leaving Panavision, Iain moved back to Europe in 2005 and provided optical services
from his company ScotOptix.
Iain Neil: “The other very big technical aspect, without getting into MTF,
is that these lenses were designed to perform extremely well
for not only 4K, but also 6K, 8K, and well beyond. Two major
things (besides distortion and a few other things) contribute to
picture quality when you talk about camera resolution like 2K,
4K and so on. One is contrast and the other is resolution. Most
cinematographers do lens tests by looking at a test chart that has
black and white bars. You can put up a Baltar, you know, a really
old lens from the 1950s, and you can say it’s a 4K lens. But there’s
a difference...
...
...“There was one snag. It was a major thing. If you look at the
trend in cine lenses in the last 20 years—the barrels got larger.
Everyone has lenses that have barrels with a pretty large diameter.
The main reason was for focus scale marks and how well spaced
apart they were—particularly in the range from 6’ to infinity.
The scale there normally is a bit compressed, so it’s a double
whammy. You need a big diameter just to get more marks. So as
a result, the lenses became bigger and heavier. If you make them
a bit too big, you reach a point where it’s even hard to get the lens
out of the lens case and you might need three hands to do a lens
change. From the user point of view, if it gets too big it almost
becomes unmanageable. So if you have these big, heavy lenses in
a big, heavy lens case, and you’re outside on location, climbing a
mountain…there are a lot of practical issues for wanting to make
the lenses smaller...
...
...Iain came up with another invention. “I arrived at a unique
way of solving, for the customer and the focus puller, a design
arrangement using the optics and mechanics, where from 6’ to
infinity we’re using half the available rotation, and from close
focus to 6’ is the other half of the travel. And that was our new
design, which even though the diameter was 20% less, the spacing
of the focus marks from 6’ to infinity is 60% greater than on most
other lenses. To achieve this kind of thing you need very good
optics and mechanics, but that’s why we put this strong team
together. We had much more than a hundred years of combined
experience on this team. The scale is even more expanded than on
the largest diameter lenses...
...
...“We were aware of the 3D trend, but this didn’t come up at
the beginning. It came up later in the design phase when we
realized that 3D was no longer a fad, but that the studios needed
something else. Smaller and shorter lenses, with a factor of about
two times less weight, and much smaller, are especially suitable for
shooting with two cameras on a rig.”...
...
..The key players were:
1. Dr. Andreas Kaufmann, a German businessman, Managing Directorof ACM, CW Sonderoptic, Chairman of Leica;
2. Christian Skrein, an Austrian businessman, Viennese photographer, filmmaker, collector, longtime friend of
3. Otto Nemenz, an Austrian in LA, President of Otto Nemenz International; and
4. Iain Neil, a Scotsman in Lugano, optical designer..."
Read more at the current issue of
Film & Digital Times 32 & 33, Leica Cine Lens Saga, pages 32-37 >>>
