At 09:48 12/16/01, you wrote:
From what I remeber Hassleblad made them for some
tire companies for tire inspections and serious
industrial usage. Never released them to the public.
Wish I could remember where I saw all this, but the
lens looked gigantic and probably would cost 100k or
more if one was to order one.
Mark Lloyd
From your description they fall into the same class as the "cloud"
Nikkors; custom lenses made specifically for a custom application. $100k
each would be near nothing for a large tire company to spend compared to
the rest of their capital manufacturing equipment. It's not hard to
imagine a number of tire inspection methods that could use one.
The "cloud" Nikkors are rooted in a common photometric application for
which circular fisheyes were designed and built. Since a properly designed
180 circular fisheye preserves areas at the expense of angles, images from
them can be used to measure percentage of sky (and therefore light)
filtering through a forest canopy to whatever is under the
canopy. Similarly one can measure percentages sky covered by
clouds. Point the camera straight up and one image contains the entire sky
with the horizon forming a ring around the circle's edge.
Not surprised about the size. The 35mm format Zuiko and Nikkor full
circulars are quite large. The Kowa 6x6 lens is enormous.
-- John
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