Leica and Sony aren’t the only camera companies that slice their cameras and lenses down the middle to give the world a peek at their guts — Canon does it too. On the first floor of one of its headquarter buildings in Japan is a small museum that has a cross-sectioned Canon 1Ds DSLR and 400mm f/4 DO IS USM lens on display. Back in the day, the camera had a price of $5,500 and the lens cost $8,900, meaning Canon sliced nearly $15,000 of gear in half for this display.
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Camera innards are often shown in cross section diagrams, but here’s a Sony Alpha camera and lens that were actually sliced cleanly down the middle (we’re guessing a lightsaber was involved). The build quality of the lens definitely looks cheaper than the sliced Leica lenses we shared last week (as it should). Brownie points if you can identify both the camera model and the lens.

Image credit: Alpha Cross-section by Global Hermit and used with permission

If colleges offered camera equipment anatomy classes, this Leica lens cutaway might be one of the things you’d be examining in the lab. It’s a Leica Tri-Elmar-M 28-35-50mm sliced cleanly down the middle, revealing all the glass and pieces inside that go into making the lens.
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