A Comprehensive Work of Everything

The idea of making a super-compact 28mm actually began during multiple business trips, when I carried a Minolta CLE (the most compact M-mount camera) everywhere and shot slide film. 28mm, as the camera's primary frame line and also a classic focal length for travel, led me to look for a well-balanced compact 28mm — I didn't want to carry a big lens, but I still wanted my slides to look crystal clear. Yet none of the choices on the market combined high resolution, low vignetting, and a truly compact size.

I sensed a gap in the market and began studying the idea of a super-compact 28mm more seriously. How many users out there wanted a lens like this, as I did? What about the female market that doesn't typically use M-mount cameras? Where were the trade-offs happening? What were the optical specs of each comparable product on the market? I kept posing these questions and investigating both the market and our users.

But making a compact lens that performs well and doesn't vignette much is extremely difficult. We went through two prototype versions with different design defaults, three different product managers and four ID designers came and went on this project, and we ran well over 30 rounds of CMF experiments just to land on that beautiful white finish.

In the end, when I heard some of our female colleagues asking to buy one themselves — something that had never happened before — I felt that all the effort had finally paid off. This lens is a comprehensive work of many ideas coming together: design, new materials, new finishes, optical challenges... and ultimately, controlling all of it within a reasonable cost to arrive at a good price.