Clint Milby & Jake Fruia
Perhaps the best part of Band Pro’s One World Open House is getting many of the industry’s best manufacturers under the same roof. Carl Zeiss is always leading the pack in lens technology, with their Supreme Prime lens family taking the industry by storm this past year. We spoke with Zeiss’ Snehal Patel about just that, as well as Zeiss’ new camera, Los Angeles facility and much more.
Zeiss Supreme Prime Lens Family
The ZEISS Supreme Prime 25mm T1.5 lens features an interchangeable PL mount and is marked in feet. The lens covers Full Frame sensors with a 46.3mm image circle. The internal focus design provides minimal focus breathing and a non-rotating front. The focus ring rotates 300° from a close focus of 10″ to infinity, providing plenty of room for precise focus pulls. The iris is made up of 16 blades arranged to create circular, out-of-focus highlights. Both the focus and iris rings incorporate industry standard 0.8 MOD, 32-pitch drive gears, and the lenses within the Supreme lineup share the same gear positions, making for rapid lens changes.
The lens is fast at T1.5, yet has only a 95mm front diameter. This allows you to use a wide variety of matte boxes from handheld to studio size. The lens also weighs only 3.13 pounds, while featuring an interchangeable mount system. The PL mount passes metadata and is compatible with both the Cooke /i and the ZEISS Xtended Data systems.
- Covers 46.3mm image circle, which allows you to use the lens with full-frame and Super 35mm sensors
- The lens has been designed to be small, as far as lenses that cover full-frame sensors go, to better match the diminishing size of cameras
- Though the lens is designed to be exceedingly sharp, it features a smooth focus roll-off
- The lens features a precision square helical thread that is smooth and durable
- The focus barrel features 300° of rotation for precise focus pulls
- The lens mounts are interchangeable in the field and communicate with Cooke /i, and ZEISS Xtended Data protocols
- The removable lens support foot features an integrated 3/8″-16 female threaded mounting hole
- The lens features a 16-blade iris that forms a circular aperture for round, out-of-focus highlights
- The iris markings on the lens are not linear, providing you more room for precise incremental adjustments when the iris is open on the wide end, as well as making the overall size of the lens smaller
Consistency is one of the key elements offered by the ZEISS Supreme Prime lenses: that means consistent coverage, color rendering, aperture, size, weight and ergonomics. All the lenses across the family cover full frame and even bigger sensors with an image circle of 46.2 mm. The Supreme Prime lenses are color matched across the full range and most feature a fast T-stop of T1.5.
ZEISS eXtended Data technology
Simplify and increase the accuracy of the image capturing and processing workflow. ZEISS eXtended Data unifies two data sets: key lens data based on the Cooke /i* Technology and the ZEISS distortion and shading lens data. After recording on set together with the video files, they can be applied in post-production for compositing for example by using the ZEISS developed lens plugin.
Zeiss Los Angeles Showroom
Opening early 2019, the new Zeiss showroom will be a great place to test out Zeiss lenses with a wide array of camera technologies. There will even be an editing suite for you to see your test footage in action, as well as a meta data station to take advantage of the Zeiss eXtended Data technology. The new showroom will cater to all cinematographers looking for information (practical and otherwise) on Zeiss lenses, as well as a place to learn what lens/es may be best for their project.
Modeled after the ethos “Shoot, Edit, Share”, the ZEISS ZX1 is a truly innovative camera with an uncompromising position on all facets of photography. Designed first to be a camera to appeal to the purists, the ZX1 revolves around a full-frame 37.4MP CMOS sensor, which affords high-resolution stills shooting along with 4K video recording. The sensor’s design permits shooting at up to 3 fps and has a broad sensitivity range of ISO 80-51200 to suit working in various lighting conditions. Paired perfectly to the sensor is a ZEISS Distagon T* 35mm f/2 prime lens, whose general wide-angle field of view suits a broad range of shooting applications, from reportage to landscape to portraiture. Building off this foundation, the ZX1 allows for intuitive and seamless shooting control, favoring simple physical dials and rings for adjusting exposure and employing a leaf shutter design for inconspicuous performance.
Benefitting the efficient imaging capabilities is a high-resolution OLED electronic viewfinder and an especially large 4.3″ rear touchscreen LCD. The EVF has a 0.74x magnification and Full HD resolution for bright, clear viewing while shooting. Conversely, the expansive size of the rear LCD is well-suited to image navigation and in-camera image editing via built-in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC. This advanced editing application lets you make both global and local edits efficiently, and will sync automatically with Lightroom CC on your computer.
Finally, helping to organize and get your images out into the world, the ZX1 is outfitted with a slew of connectivity options, ranging from Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to a USB Type-C connector for offloading directly to an external hard drive. In terms of saving imagery on the camera, a built-in 512GB SSD offers an impressive amount of storage space for your photos and videos, along with the possibility to organize files into collections for faster navigation.
You can learn more about all the above and all things Zeiss at Zeiss.com/Cine
