It seems that one of the first pieces of advice that photographers give to people who buy their first SLR is to get a “real” lens and don’t bother with the cheap lens-kit stuff.
This seems like a good idea until the new DSLR purchaser looks up how much a fairly simple (non-zoom!) lens can cost, and then their eyes pop out of their head.
So, why do high quality lenses cost so much? I expect to hear things like, “well grinding lenses is hard”, or “it’s not easy to make a good lens.” True, I do not doubt that, but I could say something similar about the DSLR.
I mean, the DSLR is something that has millions on microlenses and photoreceptors on a tiny sensor. It has microchips that run hundreds of millions of operations per second, a bright LCD screen, dozens of electronic options and configuration, and it does all this on miniscule trickle of power supplied by a battery. That seems very hard! Much harder than making a lens, and they sell it for $600!
What I am starting to wonder is: Does Canon or other DSLR makers use the freebie model like ink cartridges? Sell the DSLR for a wash or slight loss and make all the money on the lenses?
The better question to ask might by why cheap lenses are so cheap.
As for the expensive lenses, there’s a fair bit of hand-crafted precision work in them, as opposed to designes that were well, designed to be stamped out by the thousands.
Good lenses have always been expensive.
The glass itself is expensive, the specialized grinding machines are expensive, the processes is very time-consuming, and the yield is probably not all that great.
Once the glass is made, it has to be hand-fitted into the lens housing, and then manually aligned. Each lens needs to go through extensive QA before it ships.
You can’t compare the manufacturing of the camera to that of the lens. Most of the cost of the camera body in in the sensor, and then the rest of the electronics. As everyone knows, Semiconductor manufacturing has a very aggressive downward price curve - there are huge price reductions as the volume goes up, and the process matures. The same isn’t true for many other products, which is why there are jokes like “If Bill Gates ran GM…”
There are several videos on YouTube showing Canon’s lens factory, they are worth a look.
I believe that some of the low-end DSLR cameras are sold as “loss leaders”, but markup on lenses is not as extensive as you seem to suspect.
There are third-party lens makers (e.g., Tamron, Sigma) and their offerings are about 2/3 to 3/4 the price of the Canon/Nikon equivalents. Usually these lenses are good but not quite as good the “name brand”. They reportedly have poor quality control but Sigma at least has a very generous returns policy.
The point is, I’m sure if they could make a world-beating lens for $100 they would do so. Tamron in particular doesn’t make cameras so they have little incentive to fix prices.
No, that’s not it: other lens makers make lenses for Canon and Nikon cameras. Generally they aren’t the same price as Canon or Nikon’s, but they are in the same ballpark. In addition, once you’ve paid something like $5,000 for a lens like this one, it will last you a long time, and might outlive several camera bodies.
I think one big reason is that it’s expensive to grind those big pieces of glass in the lenses, especially the aspherical elements, because they have to me made to very fine tolerances.
Honestly your third sentence hit the mark. GOOD lenses ARE hard to make.
I will throw out one sorta exception. A GOOD lens will both be good and have a pretty low F-stop number. A not nearly as good a lens (but much cheaper) will have a not so quite so low F -number and/or be a much crappier lens at these low F-number. But if you don’t NEED a low F-number, the crappier lens can often perform as well as the expensive lens at slower (larger) F numbers.
High-end lenses also have special coatings to reduce things like color fringing and internal reflections. There’s also a motor in there (if the lens is auto-focus, which almost all are), and electronics for communicating with the camera. Some might have extra-quiet motors, which can be important for photographing wildlife, and image stabilization.
It’s not that good lenses are hard to make – it’s that Good Lenses have Many Components that must be expertly assembled. Even with mass-production technology, a well-corrected lens that has a wide field of view and a low f-number is going to have a lot of components of different types of glass, and nowadays probably has at least one aspheric element (which is a lot harder to manufacture than a lens with all-spherical surfaces). These lenses must be individually ground and polished (which isn’t that big a deal – I’ve seen the lens production at Kodak’s Hawkeye plant in its heyday. They processed up to 100 lenses on a single grind-and-polish mount), a several-stage process. They must then be cleaned and anti-reflection coated (which might be a single-stage procedure or, if you’ve got a premium lens, a multi-stage process), then inspected, and assembled, probably by hand.
I’m astonished to find out how cheaply all of this can be done by factories in the Far East for small-format lenses for, say, surveillance cameras. But for larger-aperture optics, like a good camera lens, the costs go up because the larger the optics, the most care is needed in manufacture.
Electronic components are easier to scale up for large volume production. Yes, each chip (processor and imaging detector) has millions of transistors and photoreceptors on them, but that’s all made at once together using a lithographic process. And electronic components don’t have to be assembled with nearly the same precision. Some parts of the camera do need to be precisely made (e.g. position of the sensor relative to the lens mount, and the positioning of the focus sensor), but even those aren’t as severe as the spacing tolerance between lens elements on a high-quality SLR lens.
And those “microlenses” in DSLRs? They are basically bumps molded onto a plastic plate. Each one is just a collector for one single pixel, to deflect some of the light that would otherwise fall between pixels.
All good answers, so far. Of course, the OP has linked to a Canon L series lens, which are pretty much hand-assembled.
And, if you’re in the market for an 85mm prime, there’s always the f1.2 version. the extra half-stop isn’t that much, but the quality of the glass in the L version blows the 1.8 out of the water, IQ-wise.
Also bear in mind that new SLR camera models come out about every 18 months; new lenses are on a 4 to 9 year schedule.
Something I’ve heard said, and said myself: “Buy a camera, invest in a lens.”
Lenses (like the L series) hold their value far greater and far longer than cameras. I bought my 5D at the same time as I got my 70-200 IS f2.8L. The camera was about $2700, the lens was about $1700. Were I to put both items on eBay tomorrow, I’d be lucky to get $1200 (if that) for the camera, the lens I’m confident would fetch close to $1300-1400.
Sure, although it depends on what you’re doing with the results.
While it’s unlikely that this would be the case for anyone who’s really in the market for an 85/1.2L, many digital camera owners only put their images on the web, or, at best, print out 6x4 or 7x5 pictures. For stuff like that, it’s very unlikely that anyone would notice the difference between the 1.2 and the 1.8.
Hell, even for larger prints, some of the LPM differences and other image quality stuff discussed in lens reviews make almost no difference until you get to pretty big blowups. Don’t get me wrong; those high-quality lenses are awesome, and having the larger maximum aperture also makes a big differences in low-light or fast-action situations. If i could afford a 400/2.8, i’d love to have one. But, given the things that most people do with their cameras, and the ways in which they view their pictures, the high quality lenses aren’t a really good value-for-money investment.
Reduction of aberation (same reason refractory telescopes are more exp per inch than mirror scopes) all photo lenses are refractors, as such they bend different wavelengths of light different amounts, this can be controlled, but it costs money.
*There’s no real reason to rush right out and buy new glass, while a kit lens may be the limiting factor in your gear, it may not be the limiting factor in your photography until you have some experience.
Yep. For probably 98 percent of the world’s photographers, the biggest limitation on the quality of their images is their ability, not their equipment.