CM33: Pancake Lens on Kickstarter for Sony/Fuji/Canon

[jase]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/modulaoptical/cm33-compact-manual-focus-lens-for-mirrorless-with

Sounds pretty cool, a compact pancake lens designed for APS-C including some awesome stuff like lens-mods and a focus aid called focus finder. The pricetag is not cheap, but still - it looks really cool.

I am wondering whether they can compete with the big boys.

[Nikkor]

Pretty expensive, and it's aps-c only if I got it right.

[ricardo_sousa11]

899$ for that ? They must be CRAZY !

Theire mods are no dif. than most filters that we can put infront of a regular lens, for that price (and they even mention it on the video) I could get tens of vintage glass, or go for an Art lens +  lens baby or something, this is doomed to be a failure at that pricetag.

[richg101]

Six, Hundred, Thousand, U, S, Dollars!  Madness.  

[Nikkor]

Six, Hundred, Thousand, U, S, Dollars!  Madness.  

For that kind of money they could have made it autofocus , those fancy guys.

Meanwhile in China. http://www.sonyalpharumors.com/this-is-the-new-zonlai-25mm-f1-8-e-mount-lens/

[BrorSvensson]

For that kind of money they could have made it autofocus , those fancy guys.

Meanwhile in China. http://www.sonyalpharumors.com/this-is-the-new-zonlai-25mm-f1-8-e-mount-lens/

if that lens was full frame..

[bdpq]

The whole point of going crowdfunding such as kickstarter / indiegogo is to generate the seed money without sacrifice ownership to angel investors or pay interest on a business loan.   Therefore, sensible projects can presell their stuff at a much cheaper price considering all the savings.   Does the CM33 worth $800 retail?  Perhaps, and if there is an actual product there, we will know that $800 included the risk premium.  However asking $800 now?  well, that is just greed and stupidity juxtaposed in a full fontal display of absurdity.   I bet you those CM33 guys even factored profit in their pricing to arrive at that $800 cute number.  Please do not insult peoples intelligence and please dont use crowdfunding as a source of revenue, it just wont work!  

Price the unit for the doners at cost, if your CM33 is really that good, you can then sell at $800, or even $900 retail!  at that time, the buzz will be there to sell them like PANCAKES!

[richg101]

I expect the development budget for a high end lens from zeiss, canon, nikon, sigma etc doesnt come close to what this muppet is estimating for a lens that could be auto designed with a cracked copy of Zemax and manufactured at $25usd a piece in China.  

 

[Marco Tecno]

Wow ;-) I paid 180€ for the 30/2 for nx and that's af O:-) 

[teddoman]

Whatever you think of the price, it seemed like a well written sales pitch. Had enough of a corporate feel to convince a reader that these guys could actually produce what they're claiming they will.

[Guest Ebrahim Saadawi]

I would have no problem with it being 800$ but the goal, 6 hundred thousand US dollars? What the fuck?! SIX HUNDRED. 

Rule #1 in business, nobody is going to give you 600.000 USD to start a new personal business. 

[ricardo_sousa11]

Whatever you think of the price, it seemed like a well written sales pitch. Had enough of a corporate feel to convince a reader that these guys could actually produce what they're claiming they will.

I dont doubt they will, specially when asking 800$ for each lens and having a goal of 600,000$.

I think they got way way way too greedy, and they should avoid showing vintage lenses or even mentioning it, considering there is better lenses for 10x less the price.

[Nikkor]

If they want 800$ for a lens and expect to raise 600.000$ they should at least publish some MTFs that are super exciting.

Another problem that has come to my mind is dust. On tele lenses you have the filters behind the lenses, you can clean that. But those tiny filters in the center of the lens look like dust nightmare.

[bdpq]

Another problem that has come to my mind is dust. On tele lenses you have the filters behind the lenses, you can clean that. But those tiny filters in the center of the lens look like dust nightmare.

That is yet another absurdity about these CM33 guys.  For a pancake lens, is it really necessary to put those toy filters inside the lens?  Is the diameter that big they can't do with those one million and one filters on the market already?  In the old days we use to stack two cheap filters together, fill it with sparkles, bokeh cutouts, grass, and even flowers to make some creative lomo effects for cheap without any complex engineering solution.    

This CM33 highlight some of the issues with kickstarter projects - Full of dreams and fantasies, believing that money will come easy...  There is a reason why those suit-wearing, bean-counting venture capitalists exist and do well.  They might now know much about photography but they know money.  they vet each investment seriously.  Can the CM33 guys convince those venture capitalists to put up $600,000 for a company that sells only ONE product?  I don't know.   But for a $800 manual lens?  They are looking at some serious competition from Voigtlander.  

They have about 50 days left, which means they need to find at least  20 donors a day. and you know what? Even if the funding target is reached, you gotta wait till November of 2016 for delivery.  

I am a big fan for Mr. Miyazaki's work (http://camerapedia.wikia.com/wiki/MS_Optical_R%26D), and have had the honor of owning two of his handcrafted Leica-mount lens.  He sells his wonderfully crafted lens about $600 a piece.  Each with great optics and workmanship.  Really, If I have $800, 900 to spend, CM33 would be quite low on my shopping list.

 

 

 

 

 

[Nikkor]

The reason for the filter inserts is because the best place for them is in the optical center, the apodization filter is a nice idea. But make the lens 300$.

[ricardo_sousa11]

The reason for the filter inserts is because the best place for them is in the optical center, the apodization filter is a nice idea. But make the lens 300$.

Even for 300$ I'd find it expensive,  it should not cost more than 200$, and even then, i'd have 0 interest in this, I bought the Samsung 30mm f2.0 for 150€ and that has full AF and great sharpness...We can get better optics for much less and the "Mods" are useless pieces of plastic. This is doomed since the design stage which is quite flawed.

[lensist]

Hi all, this is Matthew from Modula Optical -- happened to see the discussion here and thought I'd drop in a clear a few things up about our CM33 Kickstarter campaign and provide you a little more background about where we're coming from and what we're trying to achieve.

First off, the price and the size of the Kickstarter campaign. We are absolutely not making money on this campaign. You might be surprised to learn that developing, prototyping, tooling up, and manufacturing a world class lens is very very expensive -- especially when you're doing everything in the US and hand-building the final product. We're very aware that we could have built a lens in China for much less (I was an engineering director at a Taiwanese optical company for a time), but we felt that there are plenty of options out there already for those who want that. We wanted to build a lens that's engineered and built to the highest standards of optical and mechanical quality, and the only way to do that was doing it ourselves in the US. Unlike many Kickstarter campaigns that already have venture capital funding and use Kickstarter as a marketing gimmick -- setting a goal of a few thousand dollars and blowing past it -- we are truly using Kickstarter to kick start Modula Optical. Remember that setting a high campaign goal is kind of a stupid thing to do: if we don't meet our $600k goal, we get nothing! We did that because that's really the minimum we need in order to tool up and build lenses that we will be proud to put in photographer's hands and not bankrupt us. We're well aware that this lens isn't for everybody at its price, but we are aiming to serve a smaller niche of photographers that are willing to pay for the quality we're delivering. The current price on the CM33 is really "at cost" and the final retail price, if we're successful at Kickstarter, will be well over $1000. We only expect to build a limited number of these per year.

Second, the Mods. This is difficult to describe without getting into some advanced optical design, but the point of these is to do some things that simply would be impossible with a filter on the front ring. We're not planning on doing polarizers or other traditional filters because those work just fine as front ring filters (and you can use them this way on the CM33). However look at the example apodizer filter on our campaign page that provides super creamy bokeh. This effect can only be achieved by putting a very specialized filter at the stop of the lens (ie. in the middle). If you put it at the front ring, you'd just get heavy vignette and little effect to bokeh! A handful of lenses (like Fuji's 56mm APD) put this filter at the stop permanently, but that means you're stuck with it forever. Mods allow you to choose these effects on the fly. This means we can introduce more dramatic and aggressive effects, because you can pick and choose depending on your real shooting situation. Another example is the "soft focus" Mods we show, providing an effect like the old Minolta Varisoft (which required a special optical design that allowed a ring to dial in purposeful controlled spherical aberration), but using a proprietary engineered diffuser that again would only work well placed at the stop of the lens.

And as for dust, we've just posted a FAQ item on this to the campaign that will explain why we don't see this as being a problem in the end the way we've engineered the CM33.

I'm certain that many of you will still feel that this lens is too costly. I completely understand, but this is really the price it takes for us to not lose our shirts on every copy we build. There are lots of truly great lenses out there to suit everyone! One thing I love about working in this industry is that optics is always about tradeoffs. The rules of optical design were set down in the 1800s and have changed very little since then, but there are a million ways to build a lens depending what you're trying to achieve (plus computers have allowed us to optimize much further). A simplified way of saying it is that you can build a lens that performs, is small, or is cheap -- but pushing on any one of those will push the other two in the wrong direction. It's all about what you're trying to achieve. The CM33 is about taking advantage of the mirrorless format to push really hard on performance and compactness, and that necessarily drives up cost: cost of "exotic" glasses to simplify and shrink the optical path, cost of high-precision machined mechanical parts to hold tight tolerances between lens elements, and cost of labor to assemble complex parts together reliably.

So we hope that a few of you will look at the combination of optical performance, super compactness, close macro focus, features, and build quality and are willing to pay for having it all in one package. That's going to be very far from the majority of shooters, but our hope is there are enough out there to get us up and running producing lenses that can become sought-after classics.