For all you lens geeks out there, here’s a fascinating interview of Zeiss’ Dr Hubert Nasse by Matt Granger where they talk about lens design & optical technology with simple basic terms like “undesired lightpass”, “anomalous partial dispersion” and “anti-reflective limits of multi-coating for suppression of brightness” for elimination of “ghosting” and “flare”…ok, those last two were a gimme…I just wanted to make sure you were still following along.

Dr Nasse goes into detail about high performance lenses including the Zeiss 85mm Otus. For those who think Otus lenses are too big, he mentions that Zeiss could have made an even better lens had they made it double or triple the length at a considerably higher price. For the sake of hand-holding, I favor the size they chose.

One surprise is when Dr Nasse mentions that because of their extremely complex lens design, top-quality zoom lenses can outperform primes at the mid-range of the zoom. I won’t spoil anything else – it’s worth watching…