Nikkor Optical Glass

Glass work is always a feast for the eyes, especially when it is hot glass. Watch as a Nikkor lens is made from beginning to end. It is wonderful to see the care taken to search by eye for defects, refraction issues, clarity etc. It may just be for the video, but it seems that the workers truly do take pride in their product.

What I found somewhat surprising was the amount of work that went into refining the glass BEFORE it was even put into a lens mold. I would have assumed that much of the work would have come after.

8 thoughts on “Nikkor Optical Glass

  1. Careful selection of the starting materials and fine control of each process during production is the only good way to achieve any precision manufacturing task with any reasonable reliability. This can be stated in the inverse as “garbage in: garbage out.” :-)

    1. yeah, I guess it is obvious once you think about it. I just figured that they would have some kind of bulk pure material, like the powder at the beginning. I guess it doesn’t really work that way because of the nature of glass as it cools. I never really thought about it.

    1. I’m not sure which lenses these are for; whether they make all lenses this way, just the high/mid/low-end ones, etc. Personally, I suspect these are for high-end low-volume lenses because I can’t imagine they can fulfill worldwide demand for all their lenses this way.

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