You may not have heard it yet, but there’s a line of Canon cinema lenses that have been manufactured with a flaw by design, affecting the sharpness of the glass. The new gear has been out for a few months. In this article, you can see demo footage and an explanation for the peculiar release.
Earlier this year, Canon announced the new line of lenses. After hearing about them, I was relieved to hear that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t like lenses that were perfectly sharp. If you have scaled down high-resolution footage or used a rendered 3D animation, you have probably found that it looks too sharp and too perfect. In some cases, you even have to blur the image a little in order to make it pleasing to the eye. This is what these lenses are making in camera. They are adding a character and a texture to the image.
Cinema5D has interviewed Ryuji Nurishi, the head manager of the new line of Canon lenses: Sumire Prime. Nurishi shared that they had to spend some time inventing a way to make those lenses predictably soft without affecting the resolution and without introducing any other major optical defects. After working closely with cinematographers and filmmakers, they decided on a level of softness that was the perfect less-than-perfect sharpness. The lenses are said to cover even bigger sensors with 6K and 8K resolution. Below, you can see demo footage using the Sumire primes:
How do you like the results from these lenses?