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Cooke

Opticians Cooke | Cinematographic Optics

The birth of a legend

Innovation has been in Cooke 's DNA since its inception more than 120 years ago. It all began when H. Dennis Taylor, optical director of T. Cooke & Sons in York, tried to eliminate distortion on the outer edge of lenses intended for astronomical telescopes. In 1893, Taylor designed and patented the Cooke triplet (British Patent No. 1991), an elegant solution to the design problems that troubled lens designers of the time. A year later, the first fixed lens for Cooke photography was designed and sold under the Cooke brand. The triple lens was not only the model for Cooke lenses, but also a design used almost universally for intermediate-aperture lenses around the world.

Revolutionizing cinematography

Just a few years after launch, Cooke already had a reputation for excellence. In a catalogue of lenses from 1887 we can read:

"We guarantee that Cooke lenses are equal to the best and most complex of anastigmatic lenses and we will be happy to facilitate comparison at any time."

When the first silent films rolled off the Hollywood production line, they already did so with an evolution of the triplet, the Speed Panchro. The original studio Famous Players-Lasky (which later became Paramount) standardized production with Cooke lenses to create classics such as The Sheik (1921) starring Rudolph Valentino. Charlie Chaplin made perhaps his best film, Modern Times, with a game of Cooke. So, when Martin Scorsese paid homage to the birth of cinema in his 3D drama, Hugo (2011), it was only logical that his cinematographer Robert Richardson ASC chose Cooke.

Evolution by Design

Iain Neil is a multi-time Sci-Tech Academy Award-winning lens designer, ASC Associate Member, and SMPTE Fellow who has been Cooke 's Chief Optics Advisor for over a decade.

"Recently, filmmakers were telling me that the images produced by digital cameras looked mostly the same, especially with spherical lenses that they often described as 'clinical and sterile,'" he says.

To avoid this, filmmakers regularly requested that the lens manufacturer "mismatch" the lenses to remove some resolution or contrast or another feature. Neil decided to approach this problem from the opposite direction to ask, "how do you adjust the lens to the latest digital imaging technology?"

The result: the S8/i series for full-frame production, a spherical lens precisely tuned for digital sensors with all the character of Cooke Look launched in 2022. A new reference for Cooke.

Opticas Cooke

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