If you thought the primary batch of bizarre lenses was unusual, buckle up. The historical past of images is deeper and weirder than anybody offers it credit score for, and producers have tried some really bonkers concepts in pursuit of fixing issues each actual and imagined. Some of those experiments have been sensible engineering achievements that the market merely wasn’t prepared for. Others have been options so particular they might solely ever enchantment to a handful of customers. And considered one of them actually reinvented what a digicam lens even is.
If you loved the primary 5 bizarre lenses, listed below are extra 5 techniques characterize a few of the most uncommon approaches to optical design ever mass-produced. They’re simply profoundly, superbly bizarre in ways in which make you recognize how wild the digicam trade was once earlier than issues felt extra predictable.
6. Nikon 1 AW 11-27.5mm f/3.5-5.6
The AW 11-27.5mm is bizarre as a result of it is a waterproof interchangeable lens, which is a class that mainly would not exist anyplace else in images. Making this work required utterly reimagining lens development. The mount wanted O-rings and gaskets to create a watertight seal with the digicam physique. The zoom mechanism needed to be completely inside, with no extending barrel that would compromise the waterproofing. Every potential level of water intrusion needed to be sealed, which meant the lens was primarily a submarine that occurred to focus mild. The engineering problem right here was huge, and Nikon truly pulled it off.
But here is the issue: making a water-resistant interchangeable lens system means you are combating in opposition to one of many elementary benefits of interchangeable lenses, which is versatility. The Nikon 1 AW system launched with precisely two waterproof lenses: this 11-27.5mm zoom and a 10mm pancake. That’s it. If you needed anything, you needed to break the waterproof seal by altering to a non-AW lens, at which level you may as nicely simply use a daily Nikon 1 digicam in a water-resistant housing. The system was fixing an issue that almost all underwater photographers dealt with otherwise, and the market responded accordingly. The AW1 was discontinued after just some years, making these waterproof lenses a few of the shortest-lived experiments in trendy digicam historical past. But for that transient second, Nikon truly manufactured a lens that you may take scuba diving with no second thought, and that is genuinely spectacular even when it was commercially doomed.
7. The “Pancake Zoom” (Panasonic 12-32mm f/3.5-5.6)
The Panasonic 12-32mm is the poster little one for this class, although different producers have made related designs. When “off,” it is genuinely tiny, barely thicker than a physique cap and light-weight sufficient that you just neglect it is mounted. But here is the bizarre half: the digicam treats it as non-functional: no autofocus, no capturing, nothing till you lengthen it. The lens is mechanically locked and optically ineffective till you carry out a multi-step ritual: unlock the barrel lock, bodily twist the barrel to increase the lens, look forward to it to click on into place, and solely then are you able to truly use your digicam. It’s like having a lens with a security change, besides the protection change is your entire lens barrel.
This creates a weird psychological relationship along with your digicam. Is it “ready” or not? With a standard lens, your digicam is at all times prepared. With a collapsible zoom, you are on this bizarre in-between state the place you will have a digicam with a lens hooked up, but it surely’s not truly a practical digicam till you bear in mind to twist that barrel. Miss a shot since you forgot to increase the lens? That’s on you. The trade-off is pure portability. These lenses can genuinely rework a Micro Four Thirds digicam into one thing that matches in a big pocket, which is legitimately helpful for journey and on a regular basis carry. But you pay for that portability with an additional step in your capturing workflow that feels antithetical to the “decisive moment” philosophy of images.
What makes this really bizarre is that it is a trendy answer. In an period of digital all the pieces, we have gone backward to a purely mechanical lock system that requires handbook intervention. It’s weirdly tactile and nearly old school in a digicam market that is more and more eradicating bodily controls. And but it really works.
8. Sony 16mm f/2.8 E-mount and VCL-ECF1 Fisheye Converter
The base lens, the Sony 16mm f/2.8 pancake, is completely regular. It’s a compact, sharp, unremarkable vast angle prime for APS-C E-mount cameras. But Sony designed it with a particular bayonet mount on the entrance particularly for the VCL-ECF1 fisheye converter. This wasn’t a screw-on adapter. You bodily bayonet-mounted a complete optical meeting onto the entrance of the lens, and all of a sudden, you had a totally completely different lens with utterly completely different traits. The 16mm turned an ultra-wide fisheye with that attribute curved distortion and 180-degree subject of view. Take the converter off, and also you’re again to a standard rectilinear wide-angle. It’s a transformer lens.
What makes this bizarre is the philosophical query it raises: what precisely are you shopping for? Is the converter a lens? It has a number of optical components. It dramatically adjustments the focal size and character. But it may possibly’t perform with out the bottom 16mm lens. So is it an adjunct? Sony priced it like an adjunct, at round $200, when the bottom lens was $250. But it carried out like a totally completely different lens. This created an odd worth proposition the place you may purchase two very completely different seems to be for concerning the value of 1 regular lens, so long as you did not thoughts the effort of mounting and unmounting the converter. Converters aren’t unprecedented, particularly on fixed-lens cameras, however converters on ILC cameras is most unprecedented.
The system was additionally surprisingly good. Unlike low-cost screw-on fisheye adapters that destroy picture high quality, the Sony converter was truly sharp and well-corrected. It felt like a professional fisheye lens, not a toy. And but it by no means actually caught on. Sony discontinued it comparatively rapidly, maybe as a result of the goal marketplace for this sort of modularity was smaller than they hoped. Most individuals who desire a fisheye simply purchase a fisheye. The modular method appeals to a particular type of photographer who values versatility and compact storage over simplicity, and apparently that area of interest wasn’t large enough. But for individuals who owned the system, it was a genuinely intelligent strategy to get two lenses within the house of 1.
9. Hartblei 40mm f/4 Super-Rotator Tilt-Shift
Tilt-shift lenses are already bizarre. They break the elemental assumption that the lens and sensor are parallel, permitting perspective management and depth-of-field manipulation that appears like reality-bending magic. But the Hartblei Super-Rotator takes this already complicated idea and provides a lot mechanical complexity that it seems to be extra like a bit of commercial gear than a digicam lens.
The core innovation of the Super-Rotator is true there within the title. Normal tilt-shift lenses allow you to tilt and shift the optical axis relative to the sensor, however these actions are constrained to particular instructions. You may be capable to tilt vertically and shift horizontally, or vice versa, relying on the way you orient the lens. The Super-Rotator says, “what if you could do all of that in any direction simultaneously?” and the reply is a lens mounted in a posh rotating mechanism that enables 360-degree impartial tilt and shift. You can tilt up, down, left, proper, or any angle in between. You can shift in any path. You can mix these actions in ways in which could be bodily inconceivable with a standard tilt-shift lens.
The end result seems to be completely insane. The lens itself sits on this rotating mechanism that wraps across the digicam mount, creating an meeting that is much less “lens” and extra “articulated optical apparatus.” Using it requires considering in three dimensions about how your changes have an effect on the picture airplane. It’s not intuitive. It’s not quick. It’s not one thing you seize for fast pictures. But for architectural photographers and product shooters who want absolute management over perspective and depth of subject, it is a software that permits pictures that will in any other case require intensive post-production or would not be attainable in any respect. The studying curve is steep, the value is excessive, and the use instances are specialised. But for these particular use instances, nothing else comes shut.
What makes it really bizarre is how area of interest it’s. The Super-Rotator design was made in specialised mounts for a tiny viewers of photographers who not solely wanted tilt and shift, however needed full 360-degree freedom over these actions in a bodily overbuilt mechanical meeting. That’s a really small Venn diagram. Yet Hartblei produced them for years, which proves that within the professional world, “weird” usually simply means “precisely engineered for five people on Earth.” There’s a marketplace for nearly something if it solves an actual downside nicely sufficient, irrespective of how absurdly particular that downside may be.
10. Ricoh GXR System
The GXR’s core idea: the lens and sensor are a single, completely sealed unit. You do not change lenses. You change digicam items. The “body” of the GXR was primarily a battery, display screen, controls, and grip. A wise grip, mainly. When you needed to “change lenses,” you slid out your entire lens-sensor module and slid in a special one. Each module had its personal sensor, its personal optical design, and its personal imaging traits. The modules spanned all the pieces from small-sensor zoom items (like a 28-300mm equal) to APS-C items with high-quality mounted primes (like a 50mm-equivalent macro or 28mm-equivalent). Each one was a sealed, optimized lens-sensor combo. You weren’t adapting completely different optics to the identical sensor. You have been swapping your entire imaging system. You may even get a CCD sensor in a single unit.
The theoretical benefits have been actual. By sealing the sensor and lens collectively, Ricoh eradicated the issue of sensor mud utterly. Each lens-sensor combo might be optimized as a unified system somewhat than attempting to make one sensor work nicely with each lens. You may have completely different sensor sizes in the identical system relying in your wants. It was modular images taken to its logical excessive, and on paper, it was sensible.
In follow, it was a industrial failure. The economics made no sense. Because each “lens” was additionally a sensor, every module was priced like a complete digicam physique. The cheaper items landed within the mid-hundreds; the premium APS-C items pushed towards 4 figures. For the identical cash, you may purchase a traditional physique and a number of lenses from different manufacturers. The market rejected the idea nearly instantly, and Ricoh discontinued the GXR after just some years. And but it stays one of the vital fascinating experiments in digicam design historical past exactly as a result of it was so completely bizarre.
The GXR requested “what if we completely rethought the interchangeable lens system?” and got here up with a solution that was technically progressive, mechanically strong, and utterly unmarketable. It’s the last word bizarre lens system as a result of it challenges the very definition of what a lens system is. And the truth that it failed makes it much more fascinating, as a result of failure is the place we study the boundaries of what the market will settle for. Ricoh tried one thing genuinely new, and the images world stated “that’s too weird, even for us.” That takes braveness, and it makes the GXR a becoming finish to this listing of gorgeous, weird useless ends.
Conclusion
These 5 techniques characterize the outer boundaries of lens design, the place innovation and absurdity sometimes have extraordinarily bizarre youngsters. Some of those concepts deserved higher than they bought. Others deserved precisely the industrial failure they obtained. But all of them show that the historical past of images is much richer when producers are keen to take dangers on concepts that may not work. In an trade that more and more feels protected and predictable, these bizarre experiments are reminders that progress typically requires being keen to fail spectacularly. And typically, being bizarre is its personal reward.