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Scene_Cast2

Check out Fuji's GFX100S. It's a consumer camera ($6000) that can take 400MP photos.

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>It's a consumer camera ($6000)

very few consumers spend $6k on a camera, and if I spent $6k on a camera I wouldn't want it to be consumer.

To be fair, in photography nowadays, the line between professional and consumer is veeeryy thin.

I'm a hobbyist and spent 600$ on my camera, just a few years ago it was used by quite a few professionals.

I spent some money on my 50d a long time ago, and its still a great camera. Then I spent thousands on EF lenses instead and those lenses will move to a 5d2 or whatever used body I find to replace the 50d.

Just curious: these are (mostly, weighted by cost) zoom lenses, right? Or did you invest a lot into very fast prime lenses?

I think fast primes are amazing but not convenient.

My lens collection currently looks like this:

Canon 50mm f/1.8 (because its fun and cheap)

Canon 17-40mm f4/L

Sigma 17-55mm f/2.8

Canon 70-200 f/2.8 L

Canon 100mm f/2.8L Macro

You can cover quite a bit of range with the 17-55 and 70-200 in just two lenses.

I also have the original Canon EOS M with the 20mm pancake lense (which is super old at this point) with an adapter to stick EF lenses on it.

When I upgrade to an actual full frame body (my 50d is an APS-C size sensor) I'll probably want to see how zoomed 200mm feels but until then I'm pretty happy.

I still do a fair amount of hobby photography but it's one of a dozen hobbies so they probably don't get as much attention as they should.

If you go to photography forums it’s not the professionals buying the most expensive equipment, it’s “Uncle Bob.”

Not that professionals don’t have need of the high end stuff, depending on what they do. If you’re a sports or wildlife photographer you might need that $15,000 lens. If you’re a studio photographer with high end clients you might want that aforementioned megapixel beast.

Try to look up information on either and you’ll be guaranteed to see some truly bad photos by people that care primarily about gear and have the money to spend on it. The Nikon D750 is still a well regarded wedding photography camera, and it came out on 2014. That’s a long time, technology-wise. I upgraded one of mine last year to a D850 and another this year to a Z6ii, and I don’t feel as if I’ve gained all that much. They did what I needed them to do.

I think photography forums have serious sampling problems that don't accurately reflect sales of camera equipment, and I wouldn't take informal or formal surveys of photography forums as evidence that only rich 'uncle bob' buys expensive camera equipment.

My experience is that many professional shooters have much larger lens and accessory collections, have much more modern cameras and generally tend to have 2-3 of them for the purpose of having a second lens ready to shoot and a spare body on hand. For every uncle bob there are a lot of small time pros with 3x cameras as good as bob's not posting about them on forums.

I think that in general many 'professionals' aren't shooting with crazy cameras because they don't need them. a Used 5d2 is an amazing camera and its super cheap. It produces professional pictures, provided you can take them.

But the build quality and feature set make it a pro camera, not its price.

I completely agree with you in the regular pro/prosumer end of things. I have 3 D750s, a D610, a D850, and a Z6ii. I have a complete set of 1.4 prime lenses, and some high quality zooms on the long end. I’m “just” a portrait and wedding photographer.

In the ultra high end things get a bit wonky though. Most pro photographers don’t want to deal with the downsides to something like Nikon’s 58mm f/.95 lens, or a medium format digital camera. They’re niche, and have niche use cases.

I bet medium-format 1:1 macro lenses are spendy, though.

Only if they're fast. Slow objectives would get by with lenses from e.g. regular eyeglasses arbitrary-aspheric production lines. It only gets expensive (>1000$) when you need fancy glass elements (or manage to waste a lot of money on inefficient R&D... computers are really good these days, and at least for fixed-focus prime lenses (you want 1:1, right?) the parameter space is fairly small.

I can highly recommend [0] for some reading on how simple optics can be if you can optimize aspherics for a fixed focus. Just to state the obvious: two identical infinity-focused objectives can be placed with the infinity-corrected sides looking straight towards another, for a physically long 1:1 macro "lens".

I wonder if there is a decent topology for a decently-high-NA reflective objective in the 1:1 to 1:10 (object:sensor) magnification range. And also whether some of those topologies would cope with a (sensor-sized) reflective spatial light modulator (LCoS/DLP would seem most practically relevant) in place of the sensor.

I still get that mouth-watering imagination when thinking about direct digital (maskless) photolithography, as the flexibility is enormous, especially regarding rapid prototyping of highly integrated circuits (350 nm is the limit for single-patterning using aluminium-coated MEMS modulators (aka TI's DLP technology), due to the UV reflectivity drop below 400 nm and thermal limits of the MEMS device).

[0]: https://www.telescope-optics.net/

The back to back infinity-focussed objective set up works nicely with 2 sets of cheap infinity microscope objectives 2x or 4x back to back in a thorlabs tube. Paired lenses cancel out a lot of aberrations (but not all of them). I use this setup regularly for fairly close up, highly planar projective work. For 'low magnifications' say 2:1 and up the Edmunds 2X, 0.15 NA, Ultra Compact Objective has decent price/performance, but this is for sensors in the 1/1.8 - 1" range. If you come up with a nice, planar, cheapish 1:1 design for large sensors, drop me a line. (Disclaimer - not an optics person, but peered into the fascinating rabbit hole)

What numerical aperture and image circle are we talking about? 0.15 NA leaves a lot on the table (at least 0.6 NA objectives can be had for still-decent prices).

But I'd probably look at a Zeiss Planar style design.

In general, a 3/5-element design (achromat/apochromat) should do the trick I think, provided you have access to arbitrary aspherics. And in case you can accept a shift in focal length with wavelength (like monochromatic photolithography would), a single symmetric element should be up to the task, unless I'm missing something.

Thanks, we are pretty low budget. Image circles are in the 1/3", 2/3" range and we are looking at patterns with say 5 to 50 um pitch on a flat planar object, monochromatic, we control illumination, standard 3.45 um pixels (so 1k to 5kish). We have a decent small design with two elements (good planarity, ok resolving and ok ish depth of field are what we care about). But we also sometimes look at larger frame (aps-c and up) and are also interested in smaller (eg VGA Omnivision type tiny module but with a decent planar macro lens e.g. f= 4 or 6mm, for 0.5 or 1x mag would be interesting). We do imager based metrology at the sub um and nm level

Yeah, sounds like a normal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Gauss_lens from BK7 or so should do the trick. You'd have significant chromatic abberation, but with monochromatic illumination that's not a problem.

This would just be 4 normal lenses, afaik. And you should be able to reach around 100 mm image circle I guess with the low NA you get away with at that relatively low resolution.

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