We sit back at home and enjoy the thrilling games at Olympics. But ever wondered about the camera lenses used to capture those mini seconds that decide the entire fate of players. Each game is covered by many photographers with huge zoom lenses. And you will be shocked to know the cost of each lens. The lens installed on the sidelines of any Olympics event costs a minimum of $10,000. While we are still collecting pennies to buy a DSLR and tick off another thing from our bucket list, these lenses are any photographer’s dream.
And can you guess the cost of massive broadcast lenses which are being used to capture the Olympic games? Well, they come with a price tag of $200,000. Canon has more than 70 broadcast box lenses in PyeongChang, which includes some of the flagship UHD DIGISUPER 86. If you want to buy it from an open market, you have to pay around $222,980. Or you can spend the same amount to buy a Lamborghini.
The super expensive lens weighs 59.5 pounds and is 10 inches wide and 24 inches long. They are ground down from rough glass blanks and then polished by hand to get rid of any imperfections in the glass. Larry Thorpe, a senior fellow with Canon’s imaging technology and communications group said, “We spend a lot more time polishing 4K lenses because imperfections that measure just a nanometer can affect performance.”
Apart from many technicalities and amazing features, one reason for such high prices is the zoom range of the lenses. A high-end zoom lens of a DSLR can reach up to 3x or 4x of the optical zoom. The UHD DIGISUPER 86 has 86x zoom range. Massive, right? The zoom can easily focus on the minute movements of an athlete from the other corner of the stadium. Thorpe said, “In an HDTV world, every millimeter of that image format has to contain 100 black-and-white lines that you can see with decent contrast.”
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