Is 85mm the ultimate limit for f1.4?

Just want to know if some day we will be lucky enough to see a 100mm f1.4 or even a 135mm.

Is it optically possible without going mad on the price? (under 2000$ maybe)

Can you imagine what the dof would be on a 135 or 200 f/1.4 at mfd?

This Noritar 135mm f1.4 was sold for under 3 grand:

http://www.ebay.com …INT-/180657955712?afsrc=1

And it's only 8 pounds!

Porst made a 135 1.8 thought soft wide open and some serious CA.. but I believe you can get it in m42 mount. CZ has a 135 1.8 in ZA..

but yeah, that would be cool

Fastest lenses are listed here:

http://en.wikipedia.or​g/wiki/Lens_speed

How about medium format lens Perkin Elmer 114mm f/0.95 ?!

3.2 kg for the Noritar... ouch. Does that mean it's not doable lighter or that they didn't have the coating and elements we have now?

I guess the 135 f2 will have to do for now...

Canon had a 200mm f1.8 but replaced it with the current 200mm f2.0

SVTmaniac wrote in post #15369692
Canon had a 200mm f1.8 but replaced it with the current 200mm f2.0

Yeah, a lot of people loved the 1.8, but if you look at the sharpness right to f4, it wasn't good. The 200 f2 is much much better.

Optically possible? Sure.

Practical? Probably not.

It would be big and heavy. In order to have that size aperture relative to focal length, it's diameter needs to physically be 1/2 the focal length. There's simply no getting around this. An 85/1.4 has to be able to open the aperture to 42.5mm diameter and the mechanism to do that requires the Sigma (for example) to have an 86mm outside barrel diameter. Another example, in order to be an f2 lens, the Canon 100mm needs a 25mm diameter aperture, which makes that lens 75mm in diameter. So we can predict that a 100/1.4 lens would be close to 100mm in diameter, and a 135/1.4 would be close to 135mm (over 5 inches in diameter)! All the optics... the glass elements and groups of elements... need to be scaled up to accomodate the very large aperture, too. Look how big the 200/2L has to be in order to offer a 50mm diameter aperture: 128mm outside diameter, over 200mm long and more than 5-1/2 lbs.

All for what? At a 10 foot working distance, a 100mm lens at f1.4 would give less than 2 inches depth of field on a crop camera, 3 inches on full frame. A 135mm lens at the same aperture and working distance would give little more than 1 inch DOF on crop, only about 1.65 1.5 inch on FF.

To keep it "affordable", it would probably need to be cheapened in some way, probably at the cost of image quality and/or reliability. I'm no optical design engineer, but I imagine there would be some serious challenges correcting such a lens to give reasonably good image quality, to prevent distortions and aberrations, and to control flare. I doubt it could be done very well for under your $2000 price point.

there's a Wild 98mm f1.4 (now part of Leica). It can be adapted to nikon or canon mount without much of a problem. Add a focussing helicoid and tada. 100mm 1.4.