Glaswerk: Building High-End Anamorphic Lenses From the Ground Up – Focus Check ep119

by Felix TappeinerJune 4^th, 2026

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In this special episode of Focus Check, Johnnie sits down with our guests David Kellermann and Viola Evang, the co-founders of Glaswerk Optics – a German lens manufacturer developing high-end 2x anamorphic cinema lenses. Tune in to this candid conversation about their seven-year journey: from a client arriving with a box of old projection lenses, to engineering some of the most meticulously designed anamorphic glass currently in development. The Glaswerk ONE and ONE+ prime sets are on the verge of shipping, and the story behind them is anything but straightforward.

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From filmmakers to lens makers

David and Viola first met on a small commercial shoot in southwest Germany around eleven years ago. David was studying editing, directing, and economics at film school, while Viola was working as a camera assistant. After meeting during that project, she joined his company and the two began doing small commercial work alongside product development — starting with the Speed Mount, a focal length reducer for RED cameras.

The pivot to anamorphics came through a client who arrived one evening with a box full of old Schneider and Isco projection lenses, asking them to build something usable. They declined the original request, but, as Viola puts it, David quickly fell into a rabbit hole studying those optical designs. What started as an experiment with existing lens cells and a variable diopter soon became apparent that it would never meet their standards. The realization that it was “just glass and mechanics” — if done properly — set them on a longer, far more demanding path.

Funding and early challenges

The company was founded in 2018. The first prototype was shown publicly at Cine Gear Expo 2019 in Los Angeles — assembled so close to departure that the last screw went in half an hour before their train to the airport. The aspherical elements had arrived from a new supplier only days earlier, after the original manufacturer had delivered parts out of spec.

Getting started financially required creative solutions. Banks were not interested in a lens development project — no industry data, no precedent for assessing risk. Venture capital was equally uninterested, given the thin margins of high-end optical products. David’s parents ultimately guaranteed a bank loan, which the company was eventually able to repay as pre-orders and investments came in. A specific investment structure available in Germany allowed outside investors to participate in the company’s profits and losses without taking on ownership — a model that helped sustain the project through its longer-than-expected development.

David is candid about the economics: anyone considering entering lens development should expect timelines and costs to run at least double or triple initial estimates. Optics, he says, is consistently the most time-intensive category in hardware development.

The decision to go high-end

The choice to pursue uncompromising, full-frame anamorphics rather than a more affordable product was partly forced by reality. Viola explains that even when they tried to keep costs down during the early rehousing phase, the lenses were going to be expensive regardless — producing in Germany or with reliable partners outside Germany simply does not allow for budget pricing. With that constraint in place, they decided not to settle somewhere in the middle with perpetual compromises but instead to set their own specifications and pursue them without compromise.

Those specs: full-frame and VistaVision coverage, 2x squeeze ratio, low distortion, uniform sharpness across the frame, and bokeh that behaves consistently regardless of focus distance. The optical team spent roughly a year and a half solving the bokeh problem alone — the familiar “surfboard” or near-square bokeh shape that plagues many anamorphic designs at certain focus distances. The solution required integrating bokeh optimisation into the optical design software itself, now accounting for roughly fifty percent of total optimisation time alongside resolution and MTF work.

The development team

Glaswerk does not have in-house optical or mechanical designers. Instead, they have assembled a network of specialist external partners, each contributing to different aspects of the lens. The optical design is led by Dr. Christoph Horneber — formerly responsible for the Leica Noctilux — and his team, who also handle stray light and ghost simulation. Mechanical design came from Thomas Bischoff and colleagues, who typically work in lithography and other extreme-precision optomechanical fields, which David acknowledges may have contributed to some overengineering along the way.

A second optical design team joined in 2020, led by Dr. Elisabeth Siebert in Berlin, specifically to accelerate the design of additional focal lengths. Elisabeth is credited with the 32mm. A separate Berlin-based electronics team handles the PCB work for the integrated lens metadata system. In total, around ten people work on the development, all as external partners.

Manufacturing takes place primarily in Germany and Switzerland.

The ONE and ONE+

The Glaswerk ONE prime set covers focal lengths from 32mm to 100mm, with a 180mm T2.8 also in development. Each lens weighs approximately five kilograms — a deliberate design trade-off. By not vignetting the light path, the bokeh remains consistent and circular to the edges of the frame with no cat’s eye effect. The weight is the cost of that consistency.

Two versions exist: the ONE, which features subtle and controlled flares, and the ONE+, the flare version. Because the optical team can simulate exactly which glass surfaces produce specific flare and ghost characteristics, coatings can be tuned to enable or suppress specific optical effects. Customers can also request modifications between versions — swapping certain glass elements — if production needs change. The flare colour can be adjusted as well; the current default is a desaturated blue.

Pricing ranges from €29,500 to €31,500 per prime lens, depending on focal length, up from the original €25,000 target. The increase reflects higher-than-anticipated production costs, general price inflation over the development period, and the addition of the metadata system. Clients are primarily rental houses and distributors, with direct sales in certain markets.

Metadata and DCS

Glaswerk chose to implement lens metadata through DCS, a UK-based company, rather than licensing one of the established protocols from Cooke or ZEISS. The primary reasons were flexibility and openness: existing protocols either carried high licensing fees or imposed restrictions on which features licensees could access. DCS was willing to collaborate closely; within a week of initial contact, an agreement was in place, and Glaswerk’s development team in Berlin began work.

The current implementation captures focus position, iris, temperature, and gyro data. Future additions are planned, including distortion metadata and colour temperature storage. David highlights one particularly valuable feature of the DCS platform: a direct plugin to Unreal Engine, the software running most virtual production stages. This allows lens metadata to be transmitted to the Unreal Engine server with essentially no delay, enabling the virtual environment to be dynamically optimised based on the actual lens in use. In post-production, the same data can be used to regenerate metadata that often gets lost between the set and the VFX team.

Lens simulation tools

Beyond hardware, David points to several software tools that have shaped their development process. The company Hembach Photonik developed stray light and ghost simulation software for Glaswerk and others. David also recommends Lensen, a Blender plugin by Norwegian VFX artist Håvard Dalen called Lens Sim, which allows users to import Zemax optical design files into a 3D environment and simulate how a scene would look through a virtual lens. The simulation matches what professional optics design software predicts, but runs on a GPU and is significantly faster. The tool is designed to help both cinematographers visualise lens behaviour and lens manufacturers quickly iterate on designs in response to creative feedback.

The competitive landscape in 2026

Both founders are frank about the market conditions they are entering. The landscape in 2026 is dramatically different from 2018. Viola argues that what distinguishes premium lenses today is reliability — consistent mechanical performance, predictable optical behaviour, serviceability, and available replacement parts. David adds that while the proliferation of affordable lenses serves real needs, especially for smaller productions and independent shooters, the value of established high-end manufacturers lies in things that do not scale down: deep technical support, VFX integration data, full distortion grids, and the ability to customise lenses to a production’s specific requirements.

As for lower-end products from Glaswerk in the future, both David and Viola leave the door open. The knowledge accumulated over seven years, including an adjustment system developed to loosen tolerances without sacrificing image quality, could theoretically be applied to a more accessible lens series. But for now, all energy is focused on shipping the Glaswerk ONE.

To learn more about Glaswerk Optics, visit their website here.

You can watch and listen to the full video episode of Focus Check ep119 embedded on top, and find all episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts.