nikon

The camera lens is just about the world’s most perfect blending of technology and craftsmanship. Lens making is a skill that has been around for thousands of years and today it is paired with incredible technology from manufacturers like Canon, Leica, and, of course, Nikon. In other words, that hunk of glass hanging off the front of your DSLR isn’t just the latest a series of semiconductors — something that was revolutionary just because it was shrunk down by a few nanometers — these are real, physical objects that aren’t 10,000 times more powerful than they were in the 1980s or that cost a fraction of a fraction to produce relative to a few years ago. The camera lens is a wonderful, enduring tool that should be recognized as something different then the standard gadget or gizmo.

With this sentiment in mind, Nikon released a video celebrating the 80th anniversary of their Nikkor lenses. It’s an interesting, cinematic look at lens manufacturing, a process that seems rather low tech when compared to the camera’s innards. The guts of a camera like Nikon’s D800 are capable of capturing huge amounts of data at staggering frame rates and then crunching it all down into a reasonably small, universally compatible package, but no matter how high tech they become, a piece of glass is still required.

While the video is very well done, it doesn’t give much insight into the actual production process. It is certainly pretty to look at, but by just viewing the video it’s not entirely clear what’s happening from one step to the next. We can see a process that starts with some sort of sand (likely quartz or silica) that soon becomes a sheet of rather plain glass. That glass is heated, cooled, cut, formed, and then endlessly polished until it’s within ridiculously tight tolerances. At that point it’s tested and then ultimately put into a lens along with a number of other pieces.

The glass Nikon uses is produced by Hikari Glass, a subsidiary of the company. They are likely the real stars here, but falling until the Nikon umbrella, all the kudos go to Nikon and it’s famed Nikkor lenses.

The video doesn’t give any insight into the interior of a lens, but it’s surprisingly complex. A lens has multiple elements inside of it, each of which have different qualities — some might be aspherical while other are low dispersion. These elements all form a stack that is accurate, adjustable, and, when it comes down to it, pretty tough.