This Nikkor-O 5cm f/1.0 prototype lens was never put into production, but had a complex 8-element design.Īs for complexity of lens design, sure, a whole boat load of 3-element Trioplans and 4-element Tessars were produced over the years as the standard lens on many cameras. And if humans did have a static focal length to our eyes, why did the normal lens keep changing? 50mm is not the same as 58mm, nor is it 42mm. Some people have better peripheral vision than others, so what what one person sees as normal, someone else might not. The explanation of a lens that most closely matches that of normal human vision makes sense as if a camera “sees” what we “see”, then that has to be normal, right? But everyone’s eyes are different. Some of the more common ones are that 50mm lenses most closely approximate the focal length of the human eye, that 50mm lenses allow for the simplest (and cheapest) lens formulas, or that 50mm is the most flexible focal length that is neither too long nor too wide. I’ve heard a variety of so-called explanations for this. It did not matter what brand you were buying, or whether it was an SLR, a rangefinder, or a point and shoot, most cameras had something close to 50mm.īut why? Why did ~50mm become the de-facto standard lens for so many cameras? The 4 1/4 cm Carl Zeiss Biotar was one of the first rangefinder lenses to deviate from the standard 5cm. Anything wider than the kit lens was a wide angle, and anything longer was a telephoto. In the early days of SLRs, standard lenses were often a bit longer at 58mm, and by the 1970s, many fixed lens cameras had standard lenses a little wider, in the 40 to 42mm range but still, these lenses were considered have a “normal” focal length. Prior to about the mid 1980s when zoom lenses became prevalent, if you were in the market for a new camera, chances are it came with a “standard” or “normal” lens with a focal length of 50mm, or somewhere close to that.
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