Stupid post perhaps concerning semiconductor or the like lenses

[sun of sand]

Few days ago I came upon an ebay auction of guy selling lenses taken from a Nikon NSR unit
Step and Repeat

From what I've read semiconductor lenses are the tops in lens manufacturing
Wondered if usable at all with large format photograph?

I read that the lens on these things is about a meter long and this mans auction only has 10 or 9 separate peices that in total -if meant to be screwed into one another- would perhaps only be 1.5 feet, if that.

Still
Maybe neat or maybe not


It has like 2 hours left and still under $10.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...tab%3DWatching

[David A. Goldfarb]

If the price is right, why not try them? They may be awkward to use, might not have a very large image circle, might be optimized for high magnification or something, but who knows? They might project an interesting image.

[sun of sand]

I'm not really thinking of buying them
Just wondering

[Pinholemaster]

Cool, Nikon is one of the leading manufacturers in the semiconductor business for reduction optics.

Could be fun to monkey around with if the price remains cheap, but then I have no free time to monkey around with this lens.

Thanks for pointing it out.

[Maris]

If the Nikon semiconductor lenses are like the Carl Zeiss Jena semiconductor lenses I used to marvel at when I was a salesman for CZJ they tend to have the following characteristics:

Very large, very expensive, with multiple exotic material elements.

Corrected only for monochromatic light of a particular exact wavelength. Later CZJ examples were corrected for blue or even UV wavelengths for ultra-fine resolution.

Resolution in the thousand lines per millimetre range.

Corrected for a particular and exact repro ratio which was usually the strong reduction needed for ultra-fine semiconductor masks.

Usually operated under thermostatted conditions to avoid temperature induced image drifts. Lenses used for short UV wavelengths were used in a vacuum chamber.

Very small best image circle, typically 10 to 20 mm diameter.

As a general principle semiconductor mask projection lenses represent the limit of the lens makers art and will probably remain the sharpest lenses ever made. Even finer masks than what lenses can achieve are the future of chip making and techniques like direct electron beam writing may be the real way forward.

[Dan Fromm]

Um, Maris, Jena or Oberkochen? I ask because I didn't know that Zeiss east made stepper lenses. No reason why they couldn't have but ...

FWIW, sos, one of my neighbors has a heap of Zeiss Oberkochen stepper lenses. They're big, heavy, and can't be adapted to any camera he's aware of.

[Maris]

Carl Zeiss Jena were the makers. They lensed virtually all the top quality optical requirements for the entire Eastern Bloc including the Russian space program, the semiconductor industry (for the chips the US would not export) and a lot of military optics.

It used to be a standing joke that the MIG pilots who were likely to encounter American aircraft wanted their gun sights made by CZJ rather than Moscow Optical.

[Sparky]

It'd be the ULTIMATE in enlarging lenses for those prized 110 format negs...!!