What makes a lens high quality?
With camera equipment, it can be hard to tell what you need for your use case. Some people need some of the most expensive, high-quality equipment, while others may need the cheaper, more budget-friendly options. Because of those differences, a lot of useful features can be lost or gained.
The lenses I linked to were both cine lenses that have their own very distinct differences from regular non-cine lenses. A couple of those features are T-stop instead of F-stop, de-clicked aperture rings and being fully manually controlled.
There are differences between the two lenses themselves as well. The Rokinon lens is not weather sealed, the aperture is made up of fewer fins, and until recently they weren’t color-matched across their lens set like the Zeiss is.
My point is, there’s a lot that makes up a camera lens.
We’ll start with the basics.
The lower an F or T-stop number, the more light the aperture can let in and therefore the darker the scene you can shoot without having to let in more light for it with iso or shutter speed. This also affects your depth of field. The more open your aperture is, the less amount of your footage is going to be in focus at one time.
The more you want that aperture to open, the more you’re going to have to shell out for a lens.
One of the most important aspects of a high-quality lens is the quality of the glass inside of it. Cheaper lenses are made on a production line in batches, so it is more acceptable to have physical flaws in the glass like bubbles or to use lower quality materials like acrylic. Most professional grade lenses will be thoroughly inspected for these imperfection,s and the wiggle room on what makes a lens acceptable to leave production is a lot narrower.
A lot of higher quality lenses benefit from more complicated production formulas and corrections that account for lens aberrations, which allows for lenses in the same sets or series to maintain very similar or identical looks across all units. This also allows for lenses to be the same specific size, so you don’t have to rebalance gimbals or other rigs.
These factors don’t even come close to accounting for all the differences that higher quality lenses carry over their cheaper brethren, but it does give an idea what to look for if you’re going for a specific look in your shoot.
