Many beginners in photography are often intimidated by the high price of camera lenses when purchasing them. Compared to the price of a few thousand yuan for a mobile phone, good camera lenses such as; Big Three Yuan; The starting price is tens of thousands. If it is an ultra telephoto zoom lens required for ecological photography or sports photography, the price will be even more expensive. The lens is essentially a glass product, and the design cost can be easily shared by huge sales. Why can it be sold at such a high price?
Firstly, the lens is not just glass, good lens structures are complex.
The lens is not only made of glass, but also includes coating, focusing drive system, anti shake function, waterproof and dustproof structure, etc. Taking the Canon EF 11-24mm f/4L USM ultra wide angle lens as an example. In this lens, Canon uses super UD lenses, UD lenses, and ground non spherical lenses; In terms of lens coating, anti fouling fluorine coating, SWC subwavelength structure coating, and ASC air spherical coating are used; Adopting rear focusing and featuring a waterproof and dustproof structure. It almost gathers Canon's current high-end lens production technology.
Secondly, the price of lenses is actually quite expensive.
Fluorite is formed by crystallization of calcium fluoride and has ideal chromatic aberration compensation effect, but pure natural fluorite has a small volume and cannot be used for DSLR camera lenses. So Canon developed and established the artificial crystallization technology of fluorite, and successfully applied it to lenses. But even artificial fluorite remains expensive, making it difficult to popularize large fluorite lenses in many lenses. So Canon developed UD (Ultra Low Dispersion) lenses, which are optical lenses with low refractive index and low dispersion characteristics. By using UD lenses, the elimination effect of secondary spectra has been improved, and two UD lenses can achieve a comparable effect to one fluorite lens, with good chromatic aberration compensation performance.
Thirdly, the difficulty of lens design is high.
In the early years, the field of civilian optics was almost monopolized by the Japanese, and almost all optical lens patents from 1950 to 2000 were applied for by the Japanese. Decades of experience cannot be fully understood in three to five years or even overnight. The lens is a precision instrument, and although there are specialized equipment to measure the components, the measurement accuracy is only 0.01mm worse. After all the components are assembled, the image quality may be significantly inferior to that of the original factory. In addition to drawings, production processes, assembly and debugging processes, etc., all affect the imaging quality and yield of the final lens.
So, there are only a few common camera lens manufacturers, such as Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax, Fuji, Panasonic, Leica, Zeiss, etc., and subsidiary lens manufacturers, such as Sigma, Tenglong, Tuli, etc., almost all of which are Japanese manufacturers. We often hear about genuine, smuggled, second-hand, 90% new or refurbished camera lenses when buying them, but we hardly hear about counterfeit lenses. Due to the high difficulty of lens design, few counterfeit factories dare to try and replicate it.
Finally, lens sales are low.
On February 14, 2019, Canon announced that as of December 19, 2018, the cumulative production of Canon EF and RF series lenses had reached 140 million units. Note that this is all production since the birth of EF mount in 1987. Excluding RF mount lenses, the average annual production is not much. Compared to mobile phones, cameras are not essential. In the office, restaurant, and on the street… … Almost everyone has a mobile phone, but not everyone has a camera or a lens. Demand determines sales, and sales affect prices, which is why lenses are so expensive.
The above are the main reasons why camera lenses are expensive. Teacher Jinhua once again reminds photography beginners that there is no need to purchase their first lens directly; Big Three Yuan; Waiting for expensive lenses, ordinary entry-level zoom lenses can learn photography very well.
