Hi! g> 1. Price, redesigning the lens to be more economically manufactured with g> automated machinery.
Tom, I fail to see how optical formula can be of importance here. I can see that going from M to A and introduction of electronics in the mount had caused change of lens internals. But not optics, I think. g> 2. Size, as with the M lenses, the whole thing could be made more compact. BTW, g> AFAIK no M lens is the same formula as any K lens. The ones that were just g> continued to be K lenses. The 24/2.8 comes readily to mind, there never was an M g> version they just continued to sell the K as it was fairly compact to begin with. Without entering the debate on quality of M lenses... But, indeed change of size would cause change of optical formula... But since M lenses, it only grew bigger (zooms)... g> 3. Optical improvements. As cheap computer ray tracing, and CAM became available g> it was possible to improve old designs, many very substantially. I don't know g> how many of you remember how lenses were designed before computers, but g> basically the drew them up on paper, did a ray trace with protractors, rulers, g> and pencil. If they aberations were too high they redesigned it and went through g> the process again. Then again, and again taking maybe a week each time until g> they got something that was acceptable on paper. Then they made a prototype. If g> it was bad, they started over. If it was good they went with it as all this was g> very expensive. Well, I cannot remember what was life before computers. Mostly, I wasn't there to collect my memories <g>... But I fail to see how much optical improvement could be achieved, say in going from F to FA lenses. g> Now with computer ray tracing they design the lens using a specialized CAD g> program. The computer does a ray trace in minutes, I guess nowadays, and if it g> is not good they change the glass specifications, or a curve and run it again. g> As you can see they can now redesign a lens a 100 times in the time it took for g> them to do it once in the old days. In fact it is fairly easy to design g> photographic optics these days. In the hand tracing days zooms, for instance, g> were insanely expensive. Basically the M series were the first that were g> computer designed. And they were designed using Main Frame computers the only g> thing with enough power back then. Now you can do it on your Mac or PC. I actually would like to play with such a program. But I realize it would stay at would-like plane of existence <g>... g> In fact it is fairly easy to design photographic optics these days. Tom - please define "fairly". Still we get lousy zooms and even not so cheap ones are often not too good. I humbly think that investing in improving the production process quality and thereby reducing sample to sample variation can do as much good as optical re-design... I truly wish I could be a programmer of any of the teams that work on the cameras micro-code, no matter film or digital... This is truly fascinating... Boris ([EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED])
