Hello all, for those of you who follow me on instagram you probably saw that I've been testing out the prototypes a bit ago. I did indeed end up picking up the first production set of the Tokina Cinema Vista Primes last week after getting really familar with them.
We in many ways are spoiled for spherical lens options as of late, but where much of my lens energy has been focused recently has been for glass for my RED Weapon Dragon 8K VV, and thesse obviously cover Helium 8K S35 too. For those who have been following the VV glass journey, things like Zeiss Otus primes and Mamiya 645 glass getting modified by Duclos Lenses have been where my focus is at. Lots of other glass in there too.
However, Tokina has a brand new designed for motion picture use set of primes and are priced very right. These aren't a rehousing or anything, these are nice T1.5 primes using aspherical elements and modern coatings, which is damn near what I've been hoping for. Another plus is that they don't breathe much at all. The other interesting thing here is these are designed for a slightly larger image circle than even the Dragon 8K VV sensor, so across the frame they are decent performers.
I shot this test scene with them at T1.5 with the 8K VV and put some of general thoughts at the end for those interested.
And yep, there are more focal lengths coming. Two of which are coming in 2017, possible if they hustle the 3rd this year as well. Much faster than you'd think. In fact this set began it's development nearly exactly when the 8K VV was announced. It's nice to have some proper primes in PL now for this format size.
I'll have to do a side by side with a few of the other options out there, but these are up there in terms of pure optical quality.
