FUJINON Premista Large Format Zoom Lenses – NAB Interview

by Jakub HanApril 21^st, 2019

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FUJINON Premista are two new cine zoom lenses that cover large format sensors. Standard 28-100mm T2.9 zoom lens and telephoto 80-250 T2.9-3.5 zoom lens are both going to be available within this year. During NAB, we interviewed Toshihisa Lida-san from FUJIFILM about these new lenses.

As you might already know from our initial news post, FUJINON announced two new large format cine zoom lenses called Premista. Those zoom lenses will support up to a 46.3mm image circle (diagonal) without vignetting. They both come with PL mounts.

FUJINON Premista – large format cine zoom lenses

The name Premista comes from a combination of the words “Premier” and “VistaVision”, which is a widescreen variant of 35mm film created by Paramount in the 50s. This name should imply high quality optics covering large format sensors.

FUJINON’s reason to introduce these new lenses are the latest trends in cinematography technology: A number of camera manufacturers have introduced large format (full-frame or slightly larger than full-frame sensor) high-end cinema cameras (RED, Sony, Canon, ARRI …). FUJIFILM and FUJINON have been monitoring this trend in the cine market over the last two years and they decided to launch these large format zoom lenses.

FUJINON Premista – large format cine zoom lenses have PL mount

The standard 28-100mm zoom lens has a consistent speed of  T2.9 throughout the zoom range. As for the 80-250mm telephoto zoom lens, FUJINON says it stays at T2.9 until about 200mm and then slowly ramps the aperture to T3.5. I suppose it was optically not possible to offer such a long range with constant aperture without making the lens design even heavier and larger (and thereby also more expensive to build), so FUJINON decided to offer the long reach with a slightly slower aperture.

FUJINON Premista Specifications

The first lens with standard zoom range of 28-100mm will be launched in August 2019. The other telephoto zoom lens FUJINON 80-250 will be available within this year (no exact date yet).

FUJINON Premista 80-250mm T2.9-3.5

The price of the 28-100mm will be $38,800 and the 80-250mm will be $39,800, so the main customers are most likely going to be rental houses. FUJINON claims to have already received huge response and demand from rental houses. You can, however, already pre-order these lenses now. Links are included below the article.

What do you think about the FUJINON Premista lenses? Do you have experience with other FUJINON cine lenses? Let us know in the comments underneath the article.