Talk:Zoom lens
From Academic Kids
Who invented the zoom lens? How does it work (specific technical details)? Michael Hardy 19:30, 30 Oct 2003 (UTC)
I'm not conviced by the end of the article, after all the first Zoom for 35mm photography had an aperture of f/2.8. As far as I know it was very sharp and very expansive. You will find a better range than 36-82 mm today but not more aperture. BTW they are some ready-made idea that I believe wrong like "progress in optical design", there's is not a huge technical progress : what you pay when you buy a lens was for a large part computation time I read somewhere that Zeiss used 200 persons for computation before WWII you can imagine that computers have radically changed the costs of lens design. Ericd 09:35, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)
- I don't know much about that particular lens, but the references I read said that early zooms, particularly those that maintained constant aperture across the zoom range (as I believe that one did, and many modern consumer-grade ones don't try to do) suffered rather badly from aberrations, particularly field distortion. They were certainly much inferior of fixed lenses of the same era. -- DrBob 16:12, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)
- What you've read not really inexact but simplistic IMO. Everybody agree that aberration issues will be more complex to fix on a zoom than a fixed lens. I don't think they were any theorical breakthrought in optics since the 50's. On the other hand I'm quite certain they were some progress in optical glasswork. Can we consider that old zooms were bad while modern zoom are good ? I don't think so. We will stick to 35mm photography to illustrate my POV the first Zoom is the Killfit Zoomar of 1959 it has an aperture of f/2.8 and a range of 36-82mm f/2.8 is a serious aperture for a zoom even today. The range is bit limited by today standards but those who tried consider it that it was a sharp lens. But this lens was very expansive. Why was it so expansive ? Because it's design required a huge time of computation on the top hardware of that time. In the same way I have a Minolta Rokkor 100-200mm f/5.6 that was the first zoom produced by Minolta it was introduced in the 60's it has limited aperture and range but is pin sharp it was also expansive but much cheaper than the Zoomar. Why ? As it has limited range and aperture it required less computation that the Zoomar it was also designed later when computers were more powerful. Things began to change in the 70's when Zoom become popular on the amateur market. Price was an important variable in the competition and reducing computation was a mean to cut down the price at the expanse of quality. Quality of consumer-grade zooms has improved because since the 70's because today any PC has enough CPU power to compute an excellent Zoom at low cost.
- Ericd 18:05, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)
