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Since the introduction of the Carl Zeiss Super Speed prime lenses for 16mm cinematography in the late 1970's, there have been no new prime lens designs from the major cine lens manufacturers - until now. Responding to the greatly increased popularity of the Super 16 format in recent years, the two major manufacturers of cine prime lenses for ARRI cameras, Cooke Optics of England and Carl Zeiss of Germany, introduce the next generation of high performance optics for Super 16.
All 35mm format lenses cover Super 16 format. As focal lengths go below 20mm, it becomes increasingly difficult to design 35mm format wide angle lenses. Size, complexity and cost of 35mm format lenses increase dramatically with shorter focal lengths. A 10mm prime with Super 35 coverage cost double the price of a 20mm from the same lens set. Certain optical design compromises have to be made in order to make a S35 format super wide angle lens. This does not allow the designers to concentrate all the optical quality in the center of the 35mm image which would account for the entire Super 16 image.
At focal lengths of 50mm and above, there is little to gain in reduced size and complexity by designing lenses to cover only the 16mm format. It makes more sense to manufacture a 35mm format lens that can also be used for 16mm with no loss in quality.
With older prime lens designs, it was known that dedicated Super 16 lens designs could outperform their 35mm format counterparts up to 25mm focal length. The break-even point of equal performance seems to be about 35mm F.L., and testing of two 50mm T1.3 prime lenses, one for S16, one for S35 format, showed that the differences at this F.L. were so slight as to be undetectable.
With the increased optical performance of the next-generation S35 format lenses, this break-even point drops to a 16mm F.L. These new prime lens sets are designed to be used along with 35mm format lenses for focal lengths of 16mm and above (14mm at the moment with the Cooke SK4).
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