Panasonic AG-UX90NTSC UX Series Tech Brief LEICA Dicomar Lens Explained

°e Leica Dicomar Lens on the UX Cameras

°e new AG-UX90 and AG-UX180 camcorders are large-sensor general-purpose professional

camcorders, designed to deliver great footage regardless of the particular shooting scenario,

whether the user is tasking it with shooting sports, or news, or live events, or concerts, or

conventions, or speeches, or commercials, or corporate films, or weddings, or interviews, or

any of the myriad other situations professional shooters find themselves in.

An absolutely key

component of being able to tackle so many different types of shooting environments, is the

lens.

While many shooters have come to rely on large-sensor cameras such as DSLRs, DSLMs,

and digital cinema camcorders, the limitations of the lens for these large-sensor cameras has

always introduced complications or limitations in shooting style as compared to the small-

sensor all-in-one camcorder designs of professional handheld camcorders.

With the UX90 and UX180, Panasonic has set out to deliver a single-lens system that provides

the quality, performance, and flexibility to let the camera excel in all these environments.

Creating such a lens that could cover the relatively huge 1” sensor and 4K resolution was a

significant task; getting it to do so with Leica Dicomar-certified performance was a significant

accomplishment.

Getting it to do so while actually delivering more capability, a wider field of

view, better image stabilization, better autofocus, and a longer zoom range, is truly impressive.

In this paper I’d like to explore what they’ve accomplished, how they approached it, and what

these innovations mean for the typical shooter.

°e Challenge of Making a Video Lens for a Large Sensor

Large sensors have taken over a substantial part of the professional videography marketplace.

In the past, there were generally just two common sensor sizes: 1/3” for a handheld camera,

and a big 2/3” sensor for a shoulder-mount camera.

Nowadays Four °irds and Super 35

sensors are becoming commonplace in digital cinema cameras and DSLRs used for video, all

using sensors much larger than even the 2/3” sensor.

However, with those large sensors have come limitations in lens design, which impose corre-

sponding limitations in how the videographer can use the camera and in what shooting situa-

tions that camera will allow the operator to get the shot.

Generally the type of lenses used on large-sensor cameras are either movie camera lenses, or

stills-camera lenses (such as Nikon F or Canon EF-mount lenses).

While well-suited to cine-

ma productions, movie camera lenses are not as practical to use in traditional news-gathering,

sports coverage, live events or other scenarios where the benefits of a smooth power zoom, au-

tofocus, or image stabilization would be useful.

And prime lenses (by definition) don’t zoom,

so if you need a zoom lens, a large-sensor camera poses additional challenges.

It’s possible to

mount genuine movie zoom lenses to these cameras, but movie lenses are (relatively) enor-

mous, and (comparatively) extremely heavy, and (comparatively) astronomically expensive.

As an example, the superb Fujinon 24-180 cinema lens offers a 7.5x zoom ratio, is 16” long,

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