I don't really know anything about photography, but I'd speculate that after smartphones became good enough for most amateur shutterbugs, lens makers were freed up to focus on people who were willing to accept extra mass for higher performance.
I doubt it. I think it mainly has to do with number of glass elements used which is driven by rising requirements because new sensors. Film was more forgiving.
I, too, don't know much about photography beyond lugging my wife's lenses ;)
Film also accepts rays that strike the surface at oblique angles, while this results in color shift or resolution problems on digital. It was actually technically easier to design high-quality lenses for film because optics did not need to be telecentric (nodal point of the lens placed at infinity). So yes, film was very much "more forgiving" than a digital sensor in this respect.
For example, a lot of early wide-angle designs (eg Biogon) were symmetric, and actually went into the throat of the camera, because if you had a 28mm lens, the nodal point was actually 28mm away from the film. That type of design went away when SLRs needed to put the mirror there, and we switched to lenses that are essentially "reverse telephotos" (the nodal point is farther away than the focal length). Modern lenses for digital cameras take this another step further and put the the nodal point at infinity, so all the rays of light are coming straight into the sensor at a 90 degree angle of incidence. However, since the lens must be a very strong reverse telephoto to accomplish this, it constrains the rest of the design and requires more elements to correct properly.
Thats a very interesting thought. The article is about DSLR and mirrorless system camera lenses though and I guess thats a market that always accepted extra mass for higher performance, in contrast to the market for compact-cameras.
I wonder wether the weight gain is based on the glas or the body. Are there more lenses with metal bodies to give them a luxury touch.
I wonder wether the weight gain is based on the glas or the body.
Both.
In the micro-4/3 system, there have been several "pro" level lenses released in the last 5-10 years. These tend to be both physically larger (to let in more light and allow faster fixed apertures) and all-metal construction. More actual glass, metal body that is physically larger = lens weighs substantially more than an equivalent focal length "kit" lens.
But to be fair they are still lighter and smaller than their full-frame equivalents. I recently got rid of my APS-C Nikon gear in favor of Olympus m43 system mainly because of this. Those 24-79 2.8 and 70-200 2.8 were beasts.
Absolutely. I was only attempting to address the upward trend line in the mirrorless (micro-4/3 specifically) graphs in the linked article.
I too sold my Canon DSLR kit for Olympus. I rarely carried the Canon stuff because it was bulky. But, I still wanted a bit more flexibility than the compact 1" sensor offerings.
