Manufacturing
When high technology meets high-end craftmanship
A couple of skills, techniques are extremely important in lens manufacturing. It takes years for a company like Angénieux to run a manufacturing process to make high-end lenses and guarantee the best quality level requested by the most demanding cinematographers.
Angénieux masters all the processes in terms of optical element, high-precision mechanical parts manufacturing and assembling. Precision and measuring is at the center of the approach.
The coating process is also part of the specific expertise of Angénieux. The capacity for a lens manufacturer to achieve perfectly this part of the process, makes it a recognized high-end lens manufacturer or not.
Coating
The coating of lens elements is a crucial stage in the production of an optical system. Without coating, a zoom lens would transmit no more than 8% of the light of the filmed object. This would result in the final image being completely dark, impaired by ghosting or the addition of unwanted objects and severely reduced contrasts.
After coating, the total transmission of a zoom with more than 20 lens elements is 90% over the entire visible spectrum of light. The optical properties of a lens can be modified through vacuum coating with one or more (up to around 300) thin layers (from 10nm to 500nm) of one or more materials.
Assembling
Once all the components of a lens have been made they are assembled together. It is a long process that requires incredible abilities. It takes dozens of hours of work to assemble these optical-mechanical sub-units and all the successive phases of adjustment must be followed meticulously in order to reach the standards expected of an Angénieux zoom. This is one of the areas where the years of experience of Angénieux’s operators make the difference. The expertise is in their eye to make the final decision. Each lens becomes unique at this stage of the production since it is where the magical combination between all the physical elements appears in an extremely restrictive frame in terms of specifications. This is the so-called State of the Art.
