I received this promotional link from Evident, and am posting it here for general interest/discussion
https://view-su3.highspot.com/viewer/66 ... b8afacceb5
MichaelG.
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Edit: __ This ‘white-paper’ contains more technical detail
https://static2.olympus-lifescience.com ... f?rev=FEAA
Olympus X-Line Objectives
Olympus X-Line Objectives
Too many 'projects'
Re: Olympus X-Line Objectives
To me, the video sounds like the Evident marketing department just discovered "something called aberration" and decided they'd convince customers (who they apparently think need to be informed about "something called aberration") that their new private equity owners are doing something about it. Who knows, maybe the video was meant for prospective shareholders rather than prospective customers?
As for the coffee bean story line -- an incredible breakthrough -- Evident has now so revolutionized microscopy that researchers can finally distinguish a cyanobacterium from a coffee bean.
A few things did come to mind. First, that Nikon long ago went to CFI60 parfocal distances. They have another 15mm to fit in various correcting lenses into something like a Plan Apo objective. One can see how using thinner lenses might be Olympus' response. That part sounds reasonable, though thinner and more closely spaced lenses come with their own problems in assembly. Heaven forbid they ever have oil intrusion and need cleaning and reassembly.
Second, they didn't mention coatings. The more lenses, the more problems with some light internally reflected and reduced contrast. Today's lenses do benefit from better coatings, Olympus surely included. I'd be impressed if they'd become world leaders in coatings, rather than avoiding the topic entirely.
Third, the video shows (some of it surely staged such as holding lenses up to the eye) all the manual labor, care, in-process measurements, and custom fitting they employ to properly space and align all those lenses in an objective. At one level that's good -- and perhaps why their manufacturing types were the ones with camera appearances in the video. Careful assembly is why pricey Japanese objectives have long been more likely to be parfocal, parcentered, and optimally spaced than something quickly assembled at lowest cost.
Yet it also screams (at least to me) a labor-intensive and high-cost assembly process. I'd be more impressed if they automated some of this and then guaranteed strict levels of parfocality, parcentering, and aberration control for several hundred rather than several thousands of dollars per objective.
By way of analogy, I'm not especially impressed when Rolls Royce or Bentley talks about all their hand detailing in a $400,000 vehicle. I am impressed when Lexus shows near-perfect robotic assembly and welding -- and JD Powers quality rankings far above Rolls or Bentley -- in an $80,000 vehicle.
Not one of their manufacturing experts mentioned steps to improve price-performance. Probably not something users will see from Evident.
The video could be worse, I suppose. I keep seeing short high tech science videos where the video producer plops something like a $200 Chinese home school microscope down on a lab bench as evidence of super duper cutting edge research.
As for the coffee bean story line -- an incredible breakthrough -- Evident has now so revolutionized microscopy that researchers can finally distinguish a cyanobacterium from a coffee bean.
A few things did come to mind. First, that Nikon long ago went to CFI60 parfocal distances. They have another 15mm to fit in various correcting lenses into something like a Plan Apo objective. One can see how using thinner lenses might be Olympus' response. That part sounds reasonable, though thinner and more closely spaced lenses come with their own problems in assembly. Heaven forbid they ever have oil intrusion and need cleaning and reassembly.
Second, they didn't mention coatings. The more lenses, the more problems with some light internally reflected and reduced contrast. Today's lenses do benefit from better coatings, Olympus surely included. I'd be impressed if they'd become world leaders in coatings, rather than avoiding the topic entirely.
Third, the video shows (some of it surely staged such as holding lenses up to the eye) all the manual labor, care, in-process measurements, and custom fitting they employ to properly space and align all those lenses in an objective. At one level that's good -- and perhaps why their manufacturing types were the ones with camera appearances in the video. Careful assembly is why pricey Japanese objectives have long been more likely to be parfocal, parcentered, and optimally spaced than something quickly assembled at lowest cost.
Yet it also screams (at least to me) a labor-intensive and high-cost assembly process. I'd be more impressed if they automated some of this and then guaranteed strict levels of parfocality, parcentering, and aberration control for several hundred rather than several thousands of dollars per objective.
By way of analogy, I'm not especially impressed when Rolls Royce or Bentley talks about all their hand detailing in a $400,000 vehicle. I am impressed when Lexus shows near-perfect robotic assembly and welding -- and JD Powers quality rankings far above Rolls or Bentley -- in an $80,000 vehicle.
Not one of their manufacturing experts mentioned steps to improve price-performance. Probably not something users will see from Evident.
The video could be worse, I suppose. I keep seeing short high tech science videos where the video producer plops something like a $200 Chinese home school microscope down on a lab bench as evidence of super duper cutting edge research.
Re: Olympus X-Line Objectives
Thanks, Pete … I suspect we will see more reactions in similar vein.
The video was just included in a very friendly, but ultimately not very helpful, response to a question I asked about my recently acquired IMT-2
I will start a new thread on that topic.
MichaelG.
The video was just included in a very friendly, but ultimately not very helpful, response to a question I asked about my recently acquired IMT-2
I will start a new thread on that topic.
MichaelG.
Too many 'projects'
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Scarodactyl
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Re: Olympus X-Line Objectives
Macro Cosmos has tried them and they're definitely better than the previoud sapo line. They're not brand new and they go back before the Evident selloff.
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Macro_Cosmos
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Re: Olympus X-Line Objectives
Evident is ultimately a Japanese company.
Being a Japanese company, they suffer from all the shortcomings of Japanese company culture, no offence, I have worked for one and with many. They have tunnel vision, general stubbornness and simply cannot understand the western market. We often have to make our own brochures and flyers because of that.
Again, no offence, cultural differences exist. All the technical jargon is meaningless, I have made the joke before that it seems like the marketing departments of many Japanese companies are ran by actual engineers. They know their stuff, but would I as a non-technical customer care? No. If you said yes, then you already know what you need and want, and thus you also would not care about such videos. You would probably mock it for other reasons.
That said, the X-line objectives are objectively better than SApos. By how much? Marginal, marginal enough for me to say "just get the SApo". The X-line objectives also predate Bain Capital's acqui$ition.
Being a Japanese company, they suffer from all the shortcomings of Japanese company culture, no offence, I have worked for one and with many. They have tunnel vision, general stubbornness and simply cannot understand the western market. We often have to make our own brochures and flyers because of that.
Again, no offence, cultural differences exist. All the technical jargon is meaningless, I have made the joke before that it seems like the marketing departments of many Japanese companies are ran by actual engineers. They know their stuff, but would I as a non-technical customer care? No. If you said yes, then you already know what you need and want, and thus you also would not care about such videos. You would probably mock it for other reasons.
That said, the X-line objectives are objectively better than SApos. By how much? Marginal, marginal enough for me to say "just get the SApo". The X-line objectives also predate Bain Capital's acqui$ition.
Re: Olympus X-Line Objectives
That shall interest apochronaut. At around 3'40", the engineer seems to check and wipe dust away by a simple finger movementMichaelG. wrote: ↑Fri Mar 29, 2024 5:30 amI received this promotional link from Evident, and am posting it here for general interest/discussion
https://view-su3.highspot.com/viewer/66 ... b8afacceb5
I more wondering why they did choose this bacteria or this illumination technique (polarized?) to show the advantage of those optics, as I - as newbie - still don't perceive a clean coffee bean, but sort of widely spread orange and green fringes... This is maybe an illustration choice for experts who will perceive how good those images are. Not being convinced, I'll keep my cheap software fix solution
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apochronaut
- Posts: 6327
- Joined: Fri May 15, 2015 12:15 am
Re: Olympus X-Line Objectives
I can see where they are trying to go business wise. Every company, especially one that recently underwent changing of the guard , sits down and sets a course at critical junctures. Some very formerly well placed and innovative corporations did not do that effectively : Polaroid, Kodak. Had they seen the writing on the wall, things might have been very different. Evident/Olympus sees the writing on the wall.
I think Olympus are responding to the fact that the market for big uber expensive diascopic microscopes is very limited and that there is a market for budget microscope stands and increasing numbers of individuals and organizations and companies using microscopes do not have a lot of money to spend. However, microscope sales are up and many purchasers of budget stands envision or eventually envision upgrading their fully functional existing stand. Thus, Oympus have opted to stay in the 45mm parfocal market and miniaturize with precision thin lenses and probably no shimming, while maintaining competitive in terms of image formation. Maybe even a step ahead. A question that obviously was front and center in their decision was :
What is the biggest market for microscope objectives? The answer is Olympus format 180mm reference length infinity corrected microscope users. That includes an awful lot of users in China and Japan and Vietnam, Malaysia, Africa : the whole world in fact.
That ad is about selling objectives, not microscopes. Nowhere does it talk about buying a microscope from them. Just objectives. Anyone can upgrade the microscope they have learned on or learned to love or feel ergonomically connected to, simply by upgrading the objectives. You can't really do that with 60mm parfocal or 164.5mm reference length objectives. Evident have a captive market for anyone wanting to upgrade an Olympus format microscope and there are 100's of thousands of them out there. Of course, they would like you to buy an entire system from them but they'll take that captive objective upgrade market, thank you.
It is probably a good decision for them. If they were to have changed course now, and opted for a longer parfocal length program, it would have been difficult. Could they have survived carving out an uncharted market while fracturing the company's product line? Nikon and Leica made the leap years ago. Leica had nothing to lose because they were almost starting from scratch anyway and had the carcasses of 7 dispensible companies to feed off of, selling anything and everything under the Leica flag. Nikon did it at a time when their current fortunes with the existing product line were not very good. Zeiss is another situation altogether. Olympus has opted to miniaturize. Thin lenses, probably proprietary glass formulas. It might be the way of the future. Less material cost, less shipping cost, lower carbon footprint.
Didn't that model using that microscope look kind of European? Maybe even, German?
I think Olympus are responding to the fact that the market for big uber expensive diascopic microscopes is very limited and that there is a market for budget microscope stands and increasing numbers of individuals and organizations and companies using microscopes do not have a lot of money to spend. However, microscope sales are up and many purchasers of budget stands envision or eventually envision upgrading their fully functional existing stand. Thus, Oympus have opted to stay in the 45mm parfocal market and miniaturize with precision thin lenses and probably no shimming, while maintaining competitive in terms of image formation. Maybe even a step ahead. A question that obviously was front and center in their decision was :
What is the biggest market for microscope objectives? The answer is Olympus format 180mm reference length infinity corrected microscope users. That includes an awful lot of users in China and Japan and Vietnam, Malaysia, Africa : the whole world in fact.
That ad is about selling objectives, not microscopes. Nowhere does it talk about buying a microscope from them. Just objectives. Anyone can upgrade the microscope they have learned on or learned to love or feel ergonomically connected to, simply by upgrading the objectives. You can't really do that with 60mm parfocal or 164.5mm reference length objectives. Evident have a captive market for anyone wanting to upgrade an Olympus format microscope and there are 100's of thousands of them out there. Of course, they would like you to buy an entire system from them but they'll take that captive objective upgrade market, thank you.
It is probably a good decision for them. If they were to have changed course now, and opted for a longer parfocal length program, it would have been difficult. Could they have survived carving out an uncharted market while fracturing the company's product line? Nikon and Leica made the leap years ago. Leica had nothing to lose because they were almost starting from scratch anyway and had the carcasses of 7 dispensible companies to feed off of, selling anything and everything under the Leica flag. Nikon did it at a time when their current fortunes with the existing product line were not very good. Zeiss is another situation altogether. Olympus has opted to miniaturize. Thin lenses, probably proprietary glass formulas. It might be the way of the future. Less material cost, less shipping cost, lower carbon footprint.
Didn't that model using that microscope look kind of European? Maybe even, German?