PentaxLife Tag: coating

DonDouglas on "Anyone here from Sonoma County?"

DonDouglas — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 07:04:29 +0000

I’m old enough to remember when OCLI was offering the service in American Cinematographer magazine in the 60s and later when the coatings were first offered on Pentax cameras, and I’ve known people who worked at OCLI, etc.

Zeiss T*, Fuji EBC and others all came later and I still don’t think anyone beats Pentax for flare reduction (although I can’t point toward tests which prove that).

According to this perspective of a Leica user -- http://leica-users.org/v17/msg14872.html -- the thing they did was find a way to make multicoating economically feasible in mass production, not to invent it.

holycat on "Anyone here from Sonoma County?"

holycat — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 04:53:10 +0000

Hmm... that's interesting. where did you find that?

DonDouglas on "Anyone here from Sonoma County?"

DonDouglas — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 15:08:00 +0000

It might interest you to know that the Super Multi Coating which is unique to Pentax was actually developed at OCLI in Santa Rosa. I remember four decades ago when they were offering to dissemble, coat, and reassemble cine lenses for the Hollywood filmmaking industry. Following that, they made a deal with Pentax to coat their lenses. The optical elements were shipped from Japan, coated in California, then reshipped back to the factory for lens assembly. Eventually, OCLI licensed Pentax to do the coating in house.
After that, every manufacturer came out with a multicoating process in an attempt to compete with Pentax. Since the beginning in the late 60s, however, no company has ever beat the OCLI/Pentax process for reducing flare. In 1999 OCLI merged and became a daughter company of JDS Uniphase.