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UltravioletPhotography

Are uncoated lenses coming back?


Stefano

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I was wondering if uncoated modern lenses could be manufactured again, like for people who like flares for artistic purposes. As vinils and other older stuff came back for the nostalgic or people who like vintage things.

 

I searched on Google and found this from 2017: https://www.redsharknews.com/production/item/4912-the-return-of-vintage-lenses-and-uncoated-optics

 

Does this mean we could find modern uncoated lenses? And can these lenses be any good for UV?

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It is not only the coating, it is also the formula of the glass.

Depending on the type of glass you start with, you could grind your own UV lenses, it can be simple or get more complicated and refined.

 

Got a lot of corroded filters that need to be polished?

A reciprocating type lap machine is great for polishing glass. There are smaller ones.

Felt pad and cerium oxide...

You can do the same manually with a microfiber cloth or even your fingers. Cerium oxide delivers a very fine polish.

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I also saw this:

 

The problem is that I don't have such machinery. Otherwise I would buy chunks of quartz/fused silica and grind those to make my own UV-dedicated lens.

 

Yes, it also depends on the glass being used, but some "common" glasses can reach down to UVB.

 

Who knows, maybe we will see a modern Kuribayashi.

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If I could find the link......

There have been some new manufactures of old flare-y lenses. If I can find the links, I'll post them. I cannot recall whether those were coated or not.

 

Stefano, you might at least want to look at the cost of pre-made elements and make a design for us. :lol: Dr. Klaus made a nice UV lens which I think he was selling for a while. Somewhere (!!) on this website is a link to designing a simple UV lens. It ain't rocket science. But then again the end product is also not a fully corrected, shift-free lens. Still, could be fun. I've always wanted to try.

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Yes some of the new fast Chinese mirrorless lenses seem uncoated as the CA and flare looks really bad. But I doubt they are good for UV as design for speed.

 

I want more autofocus lenses. I am tempted to get that manual lens auto focus adapter for either Z-mount or E-mount to Auto focus and focus bracket my quartz lenses.

I with a metabones would make a m43rds manual lens autofocus adapter, as their AF protocol works with in camera focus stacking on the Em1mk1 and Em5mk2.

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Seeing the experiments some members did here (I remember Jonathan (JMC), David (dabateman) and Ulf) with single plano-convex quartz/fused silica lenses, I thought if you could improve the image a bit by adding a second element. Single lenses are "good" at long focal lengths with a small sensor, but wide-angle lenses suffer a lot at the edges. Usually one has to stop them down considerably to have a sharp image (which, still, is not sharp compared to even simple lens designs).

 

One could buy a bunch of lenses of assorted shapes, and asseble them in some way hoping to improve image quality a bit. But "real" lenses are designed very precisely, usually they are first simulated on a software and only then the single elements are custom made with the precise required shape. Still, if one wants to experiment a bit, maybe trying to replicate some common lens designs, it could be a fun thing to do.

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I had a plan to copy the Wollensak 25mm f1.5 C-mount lens with fused silica. Its just a 4 element design. But didn't get to it and the Ebay seller seems sold out of the cheap elements I was buying.

 

One day I might make an auto focus lens if I could copy and take apart a Sigma 30mm or Olympus 30mm macro. But I may have to recalibrate due to different refractive indices. My fused silica is 1.458. I don't know what the glass in a Sigma or Olympus lens is.

 

Maybe someone can convince Sigma to make us an auto focus modern macro fused silica based lens in Canon EF mount so we can adapt it to any camera. Lets all email them.

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