Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/09/12
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]The Noct-Nikkor was indeed hand ground. The one and only guy who was responsible for making the aspherical front element retired years ago, and the production ceased several years ago. It is still listed on Nikon USA's catalogue, but it was taken out of the Nikon Japan catalogue about a couple of years ago. Several Japanese publications such as Asahi Camera have stated that Hoya supplies moulded aspherical elements to Leica. > Leica uses glass in its ASPH lenses. They *may* use plastic in their > 'lower' priced Japanese made zooms, though I am not sure of this. Nikon > certainly uses plastic resin elements in some of its aspherica zooms. I > suspect that their 50/1.2 Nocti uses glass. Not sure about Canon or Zeiss. > I think you can tell by the relative price. Plastic aspheric elements are > designed to produce decent optics at lower prices. Many of the aspheric > zooms offered by sigma and other 3rd party lens manufacturers employ > plastic elements.