Ultimate Anamorphic lens test

If you read my previous story your well aware of the vintage lens test done by shargrid comparing 40 different cinema lenses. Well share grid has also done the creative world anther favor by doing the same kind of test except with anamorphic lenses both old and new from Angenieux, Arri, Zeiss, Atlas, Cineovison, Cooke, Elite, Hawk, Iscorama, Kowa, Lomo, Panavision, P+S Technik, and Todd Ao.

If your not familiar with what an anamorphic lens is it is essencialy a cinematography technique of shooting a widescreen picture on standard 35 mm film or other visual recording media with a non-widescreen native aspect ratio. The lens will project an image wider than the native format of sensor/film i.e. if your camera natively shoots 16/9 but the anamorphic lens would record an image or a ratio of something like 1/2.35. the image would then be desqueezed in post allowing you to keep the same resolution without cropping to get a wider ratio.

Desqueeze image

Image recorded with an anamorphic lens

An added benefit to using these lenses is iconic oval bokeh and distrintict lens flare produced by these lenses. While different lenses manufactures play a big part in the "look" produced by the lenses anamorphic lenses have a unique look of their own. With digital film making now the norm cinematographers are stuck using basically the same cameras with the same digital sensors that produce very similar results. Unlike the days of film when the film stock could be pushed, crossed process lenses the choice in lenses have become more curial than ever to help achieve a desired look in film.

Oval bokeh

Anamorphic lens flare

To see the free lens charts and videos comparing anamorphic lenses check out the link below
https://blog.sharegrid.com/ultimate-vintage-cinema-lens-test