lensist

Hi all, this is Matthew from Modula Optical -- happened to see the discussion here and thought I'd drop in a clear a few things up about our CM33 Kickstarter campaign and provide you a little more background about where we're coming from and what we're trying to achieve. First off, the price and the size of the Kickstarter campaign. We are absolutely not making money on this campaign. You might be surprised to learn that developing, prototyping, tooling up, and manufacturing a world class lens is very very expensive -- especially when you're doing everything in the US and hand-building the final product. We're very aware that we could have built a lens in China for much less (I was an engineering director at a Taiwanese optical company for a time), but we felt that there are plenty of options out there already for those who want that. We wanted to build a lens that's engineered and built to the highest standards of optical and mechanical quality, and the only way to do that was doing it ourselves in the US. Unlike many Kickstarter campaigns that already have venture capital funding and use Kickstarter as a marketing gimmick -- setting a goal of a few thousand dollars and blowing past it -- we are truly using Kickstarter to kick start Modula Optical. Remember that setting a high campaign goal is kind of a stupid thing to do: if we don't meet our $600k goal, we get nothing! We did that because that's really the minimum we need in order to tool up and build lenses that we will be proud to put in photographer's hands and not bankrupt us. We're well aware that this lens isn't for everybody at its price, but we are aiming to serve a smaller niche of photographers that are willing to pay for the quality we're delivering. The current price on the CM33 is really "at cost" and the final retail price, if we're successful at Kickstarter, will be well over $1000. We only expect to build a limited number of these per year. Second, the Mods. This is difficult to describe without getting into some advanced optical design, but the point of these is to do some things that simply would be impossible with a filter on the front ring. We're not planning on doing polarizers or other traditional filters because those work just fine as front ring filters (and you can use them this way on the CM33). However look at the example apodizer filter on our campaign page that provides super creamy bokeh. This effect can only be achieved by putting a very specialized filter at the stop of the lens (ie. in the middle). If you put it at the front ring, you'd just get heavy vignette and little effect to bokeh! A handful of lenses (like Fuji's 56mm APD) put this filter at the stop permanently, but that means you're stuck with it forever. Mods allow you to choose these effects on the fly. This means we can introduce more dramatic and aggressive effects, because you can pick and choose depending on your real shooting situation. Another example is the "soft focus" Mods we show, providing an effect like the old Minolta Varisoft (which required a special optical design that allowed a ring to dial in purposeful controlled spherical aberration), but using a proprietary engineered diffuser that again would only work well placed at the stop of the lens. And as for dust, we've just posted a FAQ item on this to the campaign that will explain why we don't see this as being a problem in the end the way we've engineered the CM33. I'm certain that many of you will still feel that this lens is too costly. I completely understand, but this is really the price it takes for us to not lose our shirts on every copy we build. There are lots of truly great lenses out there to suit everyone! One thing I love about working in this industry is that optics is always about tradeoffs. The rules of optical design were set down in the 1800s and have changed very little since then, but there are a million ways to build a lens depending what you're trying to achieve (plus computers have allowed us to optimize much further). A simplified way of saying it is that you can build a lens that performs, is small, or is cheap -- but pushing on any one of those will push the other two in the wrong direction. It's all about what you're trying to achieve. The CM33 is about taking advantage of the mirrorless format to push really hard on performance and compactness, and that necessarily drives up cost: cost of "exotic" glasses to simplify and shrink the optical path, cost of high-precision machined mechanical parts to hold tight tolerances between lens elements, and cost of labor to assemble complex parts together reliably. So we hope that a few of you will look at the combination of optical performance, super compactness, close macro focus, features, and build quality and are willing to pay for having it all in one package. That's going to be very far from the majority of shooters, but our hope is there are enough out there to get us up and running producing lenses that can become sought-after classics.