Cosina Out-Bonks Bonkers Lenses

Cosina is putting together a couple lens designs for 25mm to 30mm MFT-mount lenses ranging in aperture from f/0.95 to f/0.8.

It wasn’t very long ago that an f/0.95 lens was considered the craziest of the bright lenses, with precisely none of them rising to sharp image quality, sacrificing that concern for maximum aperture. The Nikon Noct lens, a 58mm, $8,000, 54-ounce monstrosity of excess, is used more often as a unit of extreme weight than by photographers taking pictures.

But then, f/1.2 lenses used to have the same reputation. Older versions of the Canon 50mm f/1.2 were praised by besotted owners for their Lensbaby-like “character.” The new RF f/1.2 lenses are sharp screamers.

So Cosina dipping into the f/0.8 territory is interesting not just because, well, physics, but because it may signal that the f/0.95 variants might actually be compromises that have some consideration for sharpness.

In the graphs above that show resolving capabilities of the lenses (sort of like MTF charts), the closeness of these curves to the origin of the x axis shows that – at least in the center – it should be pretty sharp. In theory.