The lens design process

They don’t just appear out of thin

air. Somebody has to design every new lens, and it’s a constant challenge to get lenses sharper, smaller, faster and cheaper, and even to make new kinds of lenses that no-one has seen before.

Feasi bility 3

New lens designs are fine in theory, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be practical to make them. This is where the lens development team steps in, to transform a theoretical design into a working lens. Here, the skill and experience of the takumi, or craftsman, is vital.

Production 4

One of the takumi’s tasks is to ‘train’ the factory machinery to carry out as many tasks as possible automatically. The Utsunomiya plant has self-calibrating automatic lens polishing machines, for example. But some stages, particularly the assembly and testing of more advanced L-series lenses, still has to be done by hand.

Demand 1

At Canon, new lens designs are driven by customer feedback and requests, but sometimes a new material or production process will come along that offers an opportunity to make something entirely new or radically improve an existing lens.

Design 2

This is carried out using highly sophisticated CAD software that can factor in the properties of the glass materials available and even production tolerances, to predict the performance of any lens design with a remarkable degree of accuracy – and this is verified by production samples.

Automation 5

The technologies pioneered in Canon’s L-series lenses may filter down into consumer products assembled in Canon’s other plants, as long as they can be adapted for an assembly-line approach. The L-series is always at the forefront of optical design, though, and benefits from this precise, hand-crafted approach at the Utsunomiya plant.