LPL Cine Lenses Future?

[Zack Birlew]

Hi, everyone, so I was looking at the new Sony 24-50 2.8 G zoom lens and wondered if Sony could make LPL versions of their G lenses but I know a lot has been confused with all the different flange distances with mirrorless mounts so the question is, does LPL serve as a future standard versus PL or other mounts? As far as I can tell there just isn't a lot of LPL development or promotion compared to the various brand mirrorless camera mounts. If Sony E could be adapted to LPL, how many would consider Sony G lenses? What about other cross conversions? Any particular big brand lens sets you would wish could be used on multiple camera systems? If LPL isn't an option, could somebody make a new universal mount that works with anything? Clearly it's just designing for a very small flange distance but is there a limit?

 

[M Harvey]

Sony E has a flange distance of 18mm.
LPL has a flange distance of 44mm.
(PL is 52mm, for reference.)

What other mount has a 44mm flange depth? Canon EF. So if you can’t adapt a lens to Canon EF, you probably can’t adapt it to LPL. (I’m out of my depth here, but maybe there could be a trick with a the design that has a small diameter, such that you can put the lens body “inside” the LPL mount, closer to the sensor?)

 

[Zack Birlew]

That's what I was thinking and it seems to be talked about like a mirrorless mount of its own but clearly it's not. Perhaps there needs to be a new pro mirrorless mount introduced that can adapt mirrorless mount lenses to it? Otherwise I'm not seeing much reason for LPL over PL.

 

[Phil Holland]

LPL was created to solve a few hurdles that optical designs may face for larger format sensors.

Firstly though, two things before I write more. PL mount with some optical designs can happily cover over 60mm diagonal. Lenses like the Leitz Thalias come to mind. Additionally, credit needs to go to Canon's Optomechanical Engineers as their last two mounts, EF and RF, are incredibly well thought out when it comes to optical design, coverage, and other more tech focused features. And taking their time has paid off really, though from a image makers perspective, boy has that been a bit frustrating.

Arri wanted some of the gains that could be found for their Alexa LF and knowing the Signatures were being designed, but focusing on shorter flange mount, it allowed them to create lenses in new ways. In the case of the Signatures particular aspects of telecentricity, coverage, and with optical designs that could be made smaller and less expensive especially on the wide side of things. This has been mirrored essentially with the newer Leitz Elsie's as well in terms of what they can get out of a lens designed with some of those mindsets.

Interestingly, the origin of the now very common mirrorless mounts were about making similar gains. Smaller, better, less expensive to manufacture optics that can be brought closer to the imaging plane to gain some additional benefits there as well.

Sony's E-Mount was born out of APS-C and isn't all roses for larger formats, but it does work and it's the path they chose. 18mm flange depth allows for that to work, but the inner diameter of the mount has been a wee bit frustrating if you've ever come up against those issues.

Though the utopic vision of various mirrorless mounts allow for a lot of lenses possibly being adapted to each system, the core mentality is still to create a mount that makes you purchase a specific system and keeps you purchasing lenses for said system. And it's a good strategy as many don't invest heavy in such things and generally take switching or even investing in other systems a difficult decision. Over the years I've heard many a tale of those feeling "trapped" within their "camera ecosystem" and this is largely the reason why. Company X comes out with a lens that you absolutely love that can't ever work on Company Y's camera. And the FOMO begins to brew.

I'm in a different spot as I own a lot of cameras and lenses, which also gives me a fairly well rounded and grounded point of view on what works well and what is somewhat a headache for various reasons.

What I do like about the "now". Outside of Arri, who is really the driving force behind LPL and that's not a bad thing, we have three major players in Digital Cinema who are providing mirrorless lens mounts so we can explore very compact and lightweight setups as well as tap into features like autofocus. RED with Canon RF support, Canon with obviously RF support, and Sony with their E-Mount support. And the good news there, lots of native glass to look into as well as A LOT of things you can adapt to those mounts with decent results.

Outside of this, we have the L-Mount Alliance, which with market share, helps make that world tik. And interestingly having the same flange depth of Canon RF, it would appear now that Canon is opening their mount up to other manufacturers will allow for some of the L-Mount glass to maybe get special Canon versions, and I have indeed performed some surgery out of curiosity to adapt an L-Mount lens already to RF. Nikon Z's lenses, even shallower at 16mm, sadly can't be used on pretty much anything else without major lens surgery. The other mounts that are also coming into play are Fuji's G-Mount and Hasselblad's X-Mount. Both pretty shallow as well.

So it's a new landscape in the now and we get to play with the new tech on a few systems. But in earnest, the filmmaking industry still runs on PL Mount and that doesn't change anytime soon.

That said, years back, and I've mentioned it here on REDUSER along the way, I tried desperately to get manufactures to agree on a 26mm flange, slightly larger ID, locking mount w/ a new electronic standard built on /i. I tried very, very, very hard. And nobody agreed to working with anybody. Knowing what I know now about how the tides are formed, I understand why it was difficult at the time. But I'll say this, that will likely happen at some point. It's just a matter of time.

 

[M Harvey]

That said, years back, and I've mentioned it here on REDUSER along the way, I tried desperately to get manufactures to agree on a 26mm flange, slightly larger ID, locking mount w/ a new electronic standard built on /i.

Curious about this 26mm idea, like the sound of it. I guess I missed previous posts of yours, any chance you can share a link to previous post?

 

[Michael Lindsay]

Sony E has a flange distance of 18mm.
LPL has a flange distance of 44mm.
(PL is 52mm, for reference.)

What other mount has a 44mm flange depth? Canon EF. So if you can’t adapt a lens to Canon EF, you probably can’t adapt it to LPL. (I’m out of my depth here, but maybe there could be a trick with a the design that has a small diameter, such that you can put the lens body “inside” the LPL mount, closer to the sensor?)

Yes this trick is used..

LPL is pretty wide so many many lens can fit inside the mount not just in front.. flanges don't have to line up at all.

Think about how the Hugo lenses fit the short 27.8mm flange M-mount optics inside a LPL lens mount...

The Canon Dream lens fits easily inside a LPL mount and with issue inside a PL mount..

The Leitz noctolux M lens when converted to PL had a frozen rear group but in the Hugo it is fine!

Also as Phil points out some large format lens designs work fine with the width constraints of the PL mount BUT conversely some really don't! Flange depth is important yes but width can be too... Leitz were not aware of the LPL mount (Arri shared this annoyingly late) when they designed the Full frame primes and they had to become pretty inventive to get such CA free lenses with huge coverage through the PL mount... they had to become less telecentric ... look at the image of the iris from the back on Sumilux C lenses and then on the Full frame lenses... very different approach taken!

 

[Remington Chase]

It's unfortunate that Phil's 26 mm standard or some other standard did not become a thing. As we are now beginning to see interesting glass specifically designed for short flange, I believe, the multitude of standards will help sell less lenses not more. The new Nano's look great and typically we would buy at least one set but not going to buy L, RF and E versions so instead bought none. It's going to be a disaster with 3 equal competing mounts. The coming Black Magic cameras will bring demand for L to the top and even if manufactures make three versions it will be difficult to keep up.

 

[Phil Holland]

I guess to be thorough, we did get some gains from going from mirrorless lens mounts to things like PL and that is the ability to put stuff between the rear of the lens and in front of the sensor. Like behind the lens ND solutions for instance, but you can also use it for diffusion and all that.

Initially the fear of something like 26mm was nobody knew at the time what others would do with mirrorless mounts, which was a repetitive note from each lens manufacturer. Historically the camera companies define the mounts. But it is a harder answer even after the dust settle for "all types of lenses". The best news is PL is a very well known standard however, despite a few going off spec when it comes to protruding into mount and all that.

My biggest frustration, which will likely be alleviated shortly, is cross compatibility between RF-Mount and L-Mount. That should be a no brainer. I think the move at the moment is to keep 3rd party manufacturers out of autofocus competition with Canon based on the latest non-Canon lens releases while allowing for electronic iris control, and that's fine for me or even full manual. The additional level of goodness there is you likely could go to E-Mount and Z-Mount from there. And that lays the ground for good cross-mirrorless design compatibility. Fuji and Hassy are a different topic and produce odder frustrations if any of that world interests us.

 

[Zack Birlew]

I can only hope something develops to make a universal mount. As an example, the Allstar Cine mount I use on my RED One MX opened up what was normally only Nikon and PL to also include M42, Contax, OCT-19, BNCR, Hasselblad, and Leica R with the corresponding adapter. There was also the IMS mount system for RED One cameras that included Leica M as well which was pretty hot there for a bit. To have a native mount that could adapt to just about anything would be ideal and really open up experimentation and style choices. I do wonder about Nikon Z as it just recently got a Fuji X adapter option on top of Sony E mount so there's a really nice circle forming around that mount for modern lenses if all the camera systems can get their acts together and produce equally top 8K+ video quality to play nicely with each other in post.

 

[Michael Lindsay]

Since it looks like Red/Arri has made a LPL with Data mount for Arri's Red Raptors... is anyone interested ore even pushing to see this functionality on normal Raptors?