Oct-19 Mount a rip-off!?

[Christopher Drews]

Support me on this!

Why would you pay $359.00 for THIS than spend $225.00 for THIS?

They are both exactly the same right?
I'd rather spend the $134.00 getting another LOMO lens.

-C

[Bob Hart]

M2 is M2 and Letus is Letus.

Nare the twain shall meet except mayhap in the scrapheap years hence when the world will be populated by cut-price OEM REDclone cameras out of Dongguan Province and rubbish dump urchins will hold the Letus and M2 up to the light and go "aaah" and make drag-along toys out of extinct 2/3" Cinealta cameras and their power cords and rag the oddball kid who tows along a Genesys kicking up dust and tarry to burn ants and cockroaches with the lenses and the overhead sunlight.

The cheaper product you point to is for the M2 and the more costly one is the Letus dedicated mount.

If you want to design and make up a dedicated Letus flange and rear shoulder, maybe have to skim some metal off the rear of the cheaper OCT19 to get the backfocus right, drill and tap six tiny screwholes into the flange, buy six screws, assuming you can source them, to fit that alternative adaptor up to the Letus, feel free.

My betting is that the time it takes you to buy in the metal stock, sourcing, and ordering, turn it down ( three hours ) or have it turned down, drill six axial screwholes to accurate centres and thread them, assuming you can buy in the thread tap, or have this done as well, you may be well on the way to another $250 - $350 spend.

I would favour buying in the Letus dedicated OCT19 mount.

[Christopher Drews]

Aye, so there is a difference then. It does say that DoF adaptors, not just M2.

I guess I feel like Letus is so awesome on price on just about everything else. Think about this, for a piece of metal, it costs almost 1/3 the price of a new adaptor!

I feel like I just bought a great HP printer and it's time for a new ink cartridge. I go to the store and realize that there is only one brand compatible and it's nearly half the cost of the printer.

Why does the PL, OCT-19 cost so much more than the 40 dollar Letus mounts? Is it simply because the people who use these mounts have more production money? Or does the machine costs warrant charging this price?

Nonetheless, if the compatibility issues are true, I'll have to purchase the OCT-19 through Letus.

[Bob Hart]

I too tend to be a little vexed when the cost of a lens, albeit secondhand is almost half-matched by what seems to be a simple adaptor mount.

The notched mount requires a lot of small machining operations and the precision if it is to be any good must be spot on, like the work done on the back of the lenses.

Do some here have fond memories of the original reversable Nikon-Canon mount and lenses being soft and fuzzy and learning to fly like an immature fledgling from the nest when focus was attempted?

There have not been enough of the mounts made to cause the economies of scale and lowers costs we have been accustomed to. They are also made in higher cost labour environments.

The complexity of setting up a computerised machining operation for the mount might be more than setting up the machining of any of the Letus extreme case components.

[Christopher Drews]

ACK! I do remember that reversible mount! I would just tighten that thing as hard as I could and hope for the best. But usually I could pull focus though.

Honestly, I think it isn't about machine costs. It's the price range that a PL / OCT-19 mount means for production. They could just assume make it $59.00 like the rest of them. But without any competition, we have to buy it @ Letus for $359.00.

-C

[Ben Winter]

Nature of the business. It's all about adapting everyday parts to suit the needs of film production, and then doubling/tripling the cost.

A cherry picker truck suddenly becomes a "professional personal camera crane"
a couple of standard gears suddenly become "precision follow focus lens gears"
The indifocus is just a gearbox mounted on some hardware, yet it is $200+.

Do NOT even get me started on matte boxes.

Fluorescent lights, colored paper, tripods, they all get this treatment. Unfortunately we are forced to put up with it.

This however, is a precision part, machined for this sole purpose, and there are very few people who use it. Therefore, with low demand, and high complexity, I can understand the price.

[Brian Valente]

Hi Christopher

Bob pretty much said this, but to spell it out Raf is only offering the lens mount - the flange etc. is not included, and that's where the costs start happening.

Lens mounts are costly because they require tight tolerances, and are hand machined (vs. mass manufactured using a mold or some other technique).

I think that's also part of the appeal of using still lenses - many of the elements that go into them are much simpler and/or don't require sophisticated machining to get nearly identical (imho) results. Of course the experience of using the lenses in production is very different, especially to a professional AC.

my two cents

Brian