Angenieux and Cooke Join Anamorphic Forces

It’s always nice to see two well established companies collaborating. Just ahead of NAB 2013, seeing Angenieux and Cooke work together is a perfect example. Cooke has a long history of making some amazing prime lenses. Angenieux sets the standard for motion picture zooms. Imagine the things they can do, combined. Just this morning, an announcement of just that, a collaboration, was released and the results are nothing short of excellent. Cooke will be offering a completely new line of anamorphic primes that will be about the same size and shape of their S4/i line of lenses, color matched with 5/i primes. Not to be outdone, Angenieux is releasing a professional anamorphic zooms lens to complete the Cooke prime line-up. Now you can have a complete set of primes and zooms, all anamorphic, all matched, all professional grade.

The Cooke Primes

Cooke’s brand new prime lenses for the anamorphic system will come in a 25mm, 32mm, 40mm, 50mm, 75mm, 100mm and 135mm, all at T2.3. The lenses will have Cooke’s i/data system for those that prefer a little bit of data with their images. The primes will have a 2x anamorphic squeeze. Price, I imagine will be “pro range” and the lenses are slated for delivery early 2014. 

The Angenieux Zoom

Angenieux, the classic cinema zoom lens manufacturer, announced their new anamorphic zoom lens in conjunction. Angenieux claims that their new anamorphic zoom will exceed the performance of every other anamorphic zoom to date, no breathing, no ramping, and very low distortion. This is a very bold claim but if anyone can achieve this, my money is on Angenieux. A few tech specs: The focal length will be a 56-152mm as part of their new S2 (squeeze x2?). My best guess is that it’s loosely based on their successful 45-120mm zoom and will have very similar dimensions. The zoom will have a 2x squeeze, same as the Cooke primes, and be a constant T4 throughout the zoom. Coverage will be 28.8mm which isn’t great, but certainly adequate for Super 35mm production.

The collaboration

This is such a great team of high-end motion picture optics. Two different companies, both with a very rich, recognized history coming together to utilize each others strengths to better the motion picture industry as a whole. I hope we can see more ventures like this in the future to really push the industry forward and offer as many options as possible for the cinematographers of tomorrow. Duclos Lenses will be proud to carry both lines of anamorphic lenses from both manufacturers when they are available. Keep an eye out for NAB coverage right here on Circle of Confusion early next week for more details. Next up, Zeiss and Canon. 😉