pancake

Nikon's new 26mm f/2.8 is a super-thin wide-angle prime for its Z-mount mirrorless cameras and is its slimmest and lightest full-frame autofocus lens ever.

Chinese manufacturer Rockstar has released a set of incredibly affordable prime lenses that are both under $80. The manual focus 10mm f/8 Fisheye and 27mm f/2.8 pancake lenses are available for Sony, Nikon, Fujifilm, and Canon APS-C cameras as well as Micro Four Thirds.

A Berlin-based startup called ExperimentalOptics has unveiled a 35mm f/2.7 pancake lens for full frame cameras, which it calls "the smallest lens in the world."

As far as I am aware, Yongnuo’s latest entry in its ultra-cheap prime lens lineup is the first F-mount 40mm pancake lens that features autofocus. I was excited to hear the announcement back in September as I’ve always been jealous of Canon users and their 40mm f/2.8 pancake lens with its ridiculously slim profile.

MoMo is a new soft-focus lens for digital cameras by the Japanese lens company Yasuhara. Inspired by a 100-year-old Vest Pocket Kodak's meniscus lens, the Momo has a blurry quality that can be adjusted by changing the aperture.

A few weeks ago, I traveled to the Central Valley of Costa Rica for a professional development opportunity through work. While my week in Central America was focused on improving leadership skills and cultural intelligence, I was stoked for the little free time I had for dedicated bug photography.

Shenyang-based camera lens manufacturer Zhongyi is taking to Facebook to give a sneak peek of its latest creation, a Mitakon 25mm f/0.95 pancake lens for Micro 4/3 cameras. The new lens will be one of the fastest lenses available for the system: matched only by Voigtlander's Nokton series of f/0.95 lenses. The Mitakon looks to have the edge with a more affordable product in a much smaller package.

Today Lomography announced its new Lomo LC-A Minitar-1 f/2.8 M Art lens, which features the original optics from the original Lomo LC-A camera that was first introduced back in 1984. The new lens lets photographers capture the look that kicked off the Lomography movement using Leica M rangefinders and other M-mount cameras.

Remember that Taiwanese machine that can print a photo of your face onto the foam of a latte? Here's something along the same lines that's just as quirky: there's a new printer that can cook a photo of your face into a pancake.

Fujifilm has announced a strange new lens over in Japan. It's called the XM-FL, and it's a 24mm f/8 body cap-style pancake lens that features built-in photo filters that can be accessed by turning a dial on the side.

Yesterday afternoon, the folks at Digital Transitions released a teaser for the Phase One A-Series, an (and we quote) "incredible new system using Phase One Digital Backs, Rodenstock optics, and ALPA bodies giving you the absolute best in Image Quality."

There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of the company that goes by the name MS Optical, and we won't blame you. It’s a one-man operation, run by Mr. Sadayasu Miyazaki from Honcho, Japan. But you might want to take not of them now.

Specializing in unique lens designs, MS Optical focuses on creating small pancake lenses for the Leica M Mount. But MS Optical’s latest creation leaves the 'pancake' title in the dust... this thing should be called a crepe lens.

The vast majority of my photographic work is environmental portraiture, corporate and editorial photography, and interiors, some of my commercial photography does include product photos. Quite honestly, some of this stuff is pretty straightforward, take a nice representative image of the product on a clean white backdrop so it integrates onto a website (also white) seamlessly. Sometimes a client gives me a bit more artistic license, and sometimes I get to do a shoot that's just for me.

In addition to its pretty standard cameras and lenses introduced this morning, Olympus also announced something quite unique: a body cap lens. It's a pancake-style MFT-mount 3-element 15mm f/8 lens that is designed to replace your body old body cap. In 35mm terms, the focal length is equivalent to 30mm -- not bad for casual snapshots.

Canon made a splash earlier this month by announcing its first EF pancake lens, the Canon 40mm …

Pancake lenses are becoming quite popular in the industry, especially with smaller mirrorless …

I’ve always been fascinated by pancake lenses. It just amazes me that something that small can actually function. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we’ve been taking things apart to determine where and how (and sometimes if) the lenses can be adjusted optically. So, I decided to do two pancake lenses for mirrorless cameras side-by-side to see how they differed (the Sony 16mm f/2.8 E mount and the Olympus 17mm f/2.8 micro 4/3 mount). I wasn’t sure there would be much we could do with pancakes (and there wasn’t), but I still found the look inside rather interesting.

If you have a Panasonic Micro Four Thirds camera and a love for retro photos, the Skink Pinhole Pancake Pro Kit can instantly turn your camera into a digital Holga pinhole camera. It's a modular system that provides three kinds of "holes":

Depending on the desired effect, you can use your camera as a pinhole-, zone plate- or zones sieve camera. To a high degree the installed aperture determines how your vision is creatively interpreted in rendering an image. The traditional pinhole creates relatively sharp images with exposure times ranging from one second to several minutes. With a zone plate or zone sieve however, photos can be taken without a tripod, if the lighting conditions permit higher speeds.

A rumor making its rounds today is that a photograph of an upcoming Samsung NX 20mm f/2 pancake lens was leaked. The photo (shown above) looks pretty legit, and does not seem to be obviously fake or "photoshopped".

Well, in the thread on PentaxForums where the image was posted yesterday, someone pointed out that the "leaked photo" looks suspiciously like the Samsung 30mm.