why are lens with wide aperture so expensive?

[jun]

i am new (or renew) to photography. i had an interest when i was maybe in high school. at that time all cameras were film based. so now i am again into photography via digital.

i have no knowledge about lens and their constructions. i was able to open up several lens - rokkor 50 1.4 and the rokkor 135 f.3.5. and from what i saw there is really not much content - glass & body between the 2 but the price for the 1.4 is higher than the 2.8 on the used market.

most manufacturing process for glass today are mechanical. i doubt it if there are still manual glass grounders inside of nikkor or canon or leitz or zeiss offices.

i have read that a noctilus with an f.7 was sold for several thousands of $. while an f2 was selling at less than $200. i am sure it did not take the manufacturing process 100x longer to produce the f.7 lens.

so my question is why the price scale going exponential as the f stops gets smaller?

[SkedAddled]

It's simply a fact of life:
Large-aperture lenses are in high demand, and cost a lot.

This is true for older lenses as well as new; the larger the aperture,
the more it costs to buy.

[Joosep]

Strange question...
Take an analogy from anywhere, like cars.

Look at the price difference of a 100hp car and 200hp car. Now look 500hp and 600hp. At top peaks, a small difference needs alot more, its exponential. Mmm.. To give 2 hp more to a small regular car, everyone can do that, to give 2hp more to a F1 car, thats something that needs ALOT of engineering.
Its exactly the same with superfast lenses. The engineering difference in 0.7 and 1.0 lenses is so immense.
Canon has one of the biggest mount, so its easier to produce faster lenses that have a huge rear element. But still on a 50 1.0 Canon lens, the contacts are actually sitting on the rear element.
Or like the fastest M42 lens is the 55 1.2 and the back element is chipped, to fit the aperture pin.
These are the kind of things that boost up the cost.
And glass costs, dont forget it. Curving, putting on coatings and glueing huge elements is alot harder.
As I sayd, its exponential.

[Esox lucius]

Cost is directly related to product development and manufacturing costs. Not all f/1.x lenses are expensive though, take the 50mm ones for instance.

Fast lenses ie. larger aperture lenses are also considerably slower to develop, and require more complex coating technology as well as correcting elements to reduce aberrations, geometric distortion and vignetting. The wider and faster a lens is, the more it will cost.

Very shallow (as in almost non-existent) depth of field is also a photographic trend since a few years back. The more DSLR users who move to full frame the more popular it will be, because with crop factor bodies depth of field is always thicker. The more something is in demand, the higher the aftermarket value for those lenses will be.

[RioRico]

Besides what has already been been mentioned, there are these factors:

All glass is not the same. What goes into any but the cheapest lenses has nothing to do with what goes into pickle jars. Lens elements are made of different glasses and optical plastics, some rather rare and high-tech. Some 'glasses' are specially-made crystals that may take a year to grow. Lenses made from such are costly.

The processes for designing and building and testing lenses are not simple. The wider the aperture, the more design and production time is needed. I saw one estimate that each 1/2 f-stop gain requires twice the production time and quadruple the design time (or more).

The fastest lenses from any maker are often their 'flagship' models, and special care is taken to make them as perfect as possible, to justify the much higher prices. Larger and more complex elements also mean more flawed glass being rejected. Quality is not cheap.

Some faster lenses *are* fairly cheap. They may also be not very good, or may be for special uses, or may be for very small cameras. CCTV lenses in f/1 are not so rare nor expensive, but they won't do much good on a standard dSLR. Nor will an ultra-fast fixed-focus X-ray machine lens. (I just got one of those today! Cheap!)

[enzodm]

[PBFACTS]

And you forget the commercial factor

High to developp/manufacture = high price = low volume = no way to redice cost by volume purchase/manufacturing

+

This is the place (high aperture lens) to make profit (= high price = low volume = higher price .....)

As for the car when you buy options or the top of the range : options is the place where car manufacturers makes higher profit