Fujinon or Canon PL mount primes

[Iron Possum]

With the slew of 35mm Digital Cinema cameras around now, does anyone know if Fujinon or Canon are thinking about bringing out a range of Prime lenses in PL mount for the 35mm format?

 

[Mitch Gross]

Yes, I know.



(beat)



No, they are not.

 

[Iron Possum]

That's a shame. I would have thought that especially with the Red, the market would have provided quite an opening for a mid priced line of primes. Somewhere between Cooke's and Arrri's at the top end and Red's own lenses at the other end.

The only new mid priced lenses I can think of at the moment are the Russian ones. I mean how many sets of 2/3" primes would Canon/Fuji have sold? I know in Sydney there are only one or two guys who personally own sets , the rest going to rental houses but that would be only another 5-10 sets max. I know there will be many more Reds out here than that by the end of the year.

Oh well, what do I know!

 

[Lenny Manfred]

mitch, with all due respect, you are wrong. i don't know about canon, but fujinon had been talking about it for a while. at NAB they even showed on a glass case a version of their big 12x zoom with a pl mount. someone a fuji had told me a while ago that they had compared their big zoom with angenieux's version with B4 mount and that it was way superior, so they where looking at making it into a pl mount. the issue is with price, that lens is upwards of $60k in B4 mount, so they feel it might be hard to price it competitively, but they are looking into it. i would not be surprised if canon had something up their sleeve too.

 

[Mitch Gross]

With equal respect, I talk to the guys at Fuji & Canon as well. That Fuji lens under glass was manufactured about five years ago as a test prototype to see if people would be interested. It followed the same concept of Angenieux making two versions of their 12x Optimo, one in B4 and one in PL.

And that's a zoom. As far as primes go, neither company has particularly had their B4 mount primes flying off the shelves, although they both offer amazing glass. Fact is, in the video world zooms rule over primes in popularity by several orders of magnitude, probably one set of primes sold for every several thousand zooms. So there's really little chance of either company investing the R&D in making PL mount prime sets. And that came straight from the horse's mouth from those who should know at both companies.

Unless they're all lying to me as a smoke screen to beat the other to the market...

 

[Mike Prevette]

I would think Cosina would be more ready to jump on the PL market. There foray into the still market with the Voigtlander lenses for the Leica and the Zeiss M and Zeiss Nikon mount primes make them a great candidate.