Dear Kobayashi-sama

This letter appeared on a forum which I frequent:

Dear Mr. Kobayashi,

As Micro Four Thirds enthusiast with great respect for Cosina's manual focus lens offerings in other mounts, I am writing to express a desire to see Cosina Voigtlander lenses designed for the Micro Four Thirds standard.

We Micro Four Thirds users could really use a wide angle lens with good manual focus feel and a distance scale appropriate for zone focusing. A Micro Four Thirds design equivalent of any of your several excellent, current wide angle offerings in the Leica M mount - for example a Micro Four Thirds 14mm f/2 Ultron or 17.5mm f/1.4 Nokton - would doubtless be well received.*

There also appears to be a solid market for more exotic offerings, such as a superfast normal lens. Although the adapted lens market has some lenses in this category, the soaring prices of these lenses on the used market attests to a still unmet demand for a current offering, priced in the range of your Nokton 50mm f/1.1 lens.

Micro Four Thirds is a standard which can take your fine manual focus lenses to a wider market going forward, both in the still photography as well as the video arena.

I'm sure that you have already considered this option and hope that others in our Micro Four Thirds community will join me in urging you to make it happen!

Sincerely,
Amin S

As anyone reading my blog will soon see I use quite a few manual lenses on my micro 4/3 camera (which is a Panasonic G1).

While I use many of the existing AF offerings, I find many limitations in them (as I recently wrote). I feel in particular we are lacking fast normal lenses and fast wide angles. Something in the 10 or 12mm range would be fantastic.


I use many legacy lenses on my micro 4/3 camera, but I would relish the ability to be able to obtain manual focus lenses which were actually designed for this mount in the first place. I see that the main opening would be in focal lengths which were not popular (or sensible) in 35mm and also had electronic aperture coupling.

Within the complexities of the micro 4/3 electronic interface, surely the integration of aperture control would be one of the simplest things to include. It would also bring with it so much advantage to the photographer as the micro4/3 systems already make manual focus do easy, providing wide open focus, and automated stop down at taking would make focus not only more accurate but easier.

I encourage you Kobayashi-san:

ご検討

よろしくお願いします