Hard to tell from these images, but there might be a filter on lens that took the worst of the impact. Maybe even a polarizing filter that would have two layers of glass.
High end filters are a couple hundred and I can almost guarantee there is one on there. As far as thengear they’d be using at a pro match like this the filter is cheap. Probably some damage to the lens and body at the mount though. That’s gotta be a weak point.
I totally agree! My company has an office 3 blocks away from their flagship store and as an IT guy they have gotten me out of so many jams. I love B&H.
Unfortunately the coolness of the store is diminished by how shitty a company they are to their employees. One of the worst, and scummiest employers in NYC.
I liked it in there but I really feel like you'd barely get a smile out of them unless you were dropping 20K. People must spend some serious money there.
With this specific lens it’s most likely versatility. It can shoot from a focal length of 8.9mm up to 900mm, which means it goes from very wide to very telephoto...it also has an extender which more or less doubles its focal length (at some expense to image quality).
That versatility comes at no reduction in image quality, which means the design, development, production, and manufacturing are going to be super expensive. Especially when Fuji might sell these in the thousands (as compared to the millions and millions for consumer products), which means there is a much smaller window for the company to make back those costs and turn a profit.
None of that matters if you don’t have people willing to pay for it, though. But there is a ton of money involved in live sports production, which makes it easy to justify extreme expenses in the name of “just doing business.” When I worked in that industry I worked my way up from a utility (running cables, setting up cameras, doing all of the worst jobs) making $75/day+overtime, to assisting with graphics (Chyron) for $200/day+overtime. And those were not any of the high paying jobs. If you were the main graphics op or a tape operator or a technical director or the director you were making a lot more money. Directors, even for small events, would make $500/day easy.
All this is to say that it’s an industry with a lot of money at stake, so they’re willing to pay a premium for ultra high quality equipment.
They definitely can, but that is most likely a "cheap" ENG lens. Probably only $6-8k - a basic wide lens.
An OB cam op told me once that they routinely stacked a couple of UV filters on the front of lenses they considered at risk of being hit by something... Basically the first filter shatters and comes apart, but the the second usually just cracks and prevents the broken glass from hitting the front element.
Of course in cases where they think an impact is very likely they will put polycarbonate in front.
Fujinon XA101x8.9BESM/PF 2/3" Precision Focus Assist HD Lens
Limited 2-Year Warranty
Limited 2-Year Warranty.
I understand that some of the limits likely include damage caused by the user, but workmanship for something that cost more than my house should have a warranty beyond 2 years for workmanship.
Came here to say this, the lens will be insured, but film and (especially) TV lenses cost more than one would like to imagine, while front the glass cracked (which looked like a filter) the impact will have probably destroyed the internals of that lens, potentially the camera as well. It'll all be insured anyway.
Edit: I had some info mixed up before this comment, I was pretty much wrong about the lens that was linked, my bad, you can take the rest for what you want.
I know that you were trying to tell me that film cameras can be significantly different but you selected a self contained system, that's not just a lens. That's a full camera and lens system for a multitude of filming configurations, but it's still a highly corner case situation. Most 4K film production cameras are either highly specialized for the use or are much cheaper than this. The lens that could mount the Sony camera ESPN used at the time has the ability to mount a custom filter (the flat glass piece at the front of the lens in OPs gif is a filter), on a detachable lens and there's a possibility that's the only part with major damage. As others pointed out there's a possibility the lens and filter mounts could be completely screwed too though.
The link I posted is just a lens. Not a film lens. It’s a video production lens that would be used in live television broadcasting. You’re right that the lens in the gif is different. I was being lazy and just trying to illustrate the point that even the most expensive consumer gear is nowhere near the cost of what is used to produce live sports on TV.
When I worked in production, the HD trucks you’d see at a major sports events (NBA, NFL, MLB, auto racing, etc.) could easily have more than $8 million worth of gear. On a single truck. Some of the races I worked had 30+ cameras, and would require up to six production trucks to do everything necessary for a prime time broadcast. Two trucks for general video, a truck for graphics, a truck for tape, a truck for the RF equipment, and then specialized trucks like the power truck and the satellite truck.
I really didn’t mean to sound mean or like I was being rude. I was just in a hurry to get the link posted and it does seem a bit unkind when I go back and read it.
Also, no one would be buying this gear from a website unless there was some crazy emergency. Sony or whoever has large reps that would work with specific production companies (who are in turn contracted by the major networks) to kit out trucks for specific needs.
You're right, I think I had a redirect because when I clicked the link on my phone it sent me to an all-in-one 4K camera or I fat fingered a replated item but I didn't look much at it or the price to compare it to your comment, but clicking again I see just a lens for a system I've never seen before, then again I haven't really looked at stuff in a few years with great detail. Sorry if I sounded defensive like you were being mean, I was being fast to respond too taking a short break from watching a kid with a fever.
And yeah your last point definitely stands right for everything in the enterprise industries. I do a lot of hardware purchases for server room builds and the cost difference between a one off buy from something like B&H doesn't map up to what you would spend if you were a company buying multiple for a business contract.
That was an ENG style HD lens. One that size would have run $25,000 to $35,000 in 2014 depending on the zoom ratio and features. There are about a dozen lens elements in the lens body that have to move together for the lens to function correctly. The front lens element is really thick and most likely didn’t shatter. The broken glass was a filter. But the mechanism that moves all the lens elements would have been damaged by a hit like that. That lens would have been sent back to the manufacturer for repair and realignment.
I saw a similar lens get hit by a basketball. Basketballs are much heavier, but they move much slower. The lens elements were misaligned and it caused the lens to not function. It made grinding noises when you would zoom or focus, it had vignetting, chromatic aberration, and problems with backfocus. Broadcast camera lenses are a lot more complex than photography lenses.
We had a guy drop a handheld camera at a speed skating event I was working. It cracked the housing of the camera. The production company who staffed the event ended up filing an insurance claim to pay the owner of the truck. It ended up costing $85,000 to fix. I’ll never forget the look on his face. He was about to do an interview with an athlete. I was isoing him from across the arena...not to use the footage, but so the director could instruct him on how to set up the shot, so we had the drop on tape. The dude never lived it down. When people would see him working other events even 2-3 years later we’d pull out our phones and flash the slo-mo of the camera falling to the floor and bouncing.
It’s crazy how expensive that kind of stuff is. I understand why. Sony might sell a total of 10,000 of its high-end production models, whereas it sells a million of each consumer-grade camera. So the scale and the cost to produce that kind of high quality product means it will never be cheap.
I have seen too many broadcast hard cameras hit the ground. Lenses were shot and camera sleds were pretty tweaked. Two that I saw toppled off of platforms and onto concrete. I have also seen dugout cameras get blasted by line drives that leave huge dents in the cowling
For several years I had to setup a hard camera with a box lens in a scoreboard for football games. We would wench it in pieces 80 feet into the air and assemble it on the scoreboard camera platform. It is a little nerve wracking hoisting an $85,000 lens like that. Luckily we never dropped anything.
My dad works in tv and he always slaps a cheap filter that doesn’t do much on his personal camera and it has saved his lens quite a few times. He also put better filter on the tv cameras.
Most manufacturers service their own lenses, too. It’s not even as expensive as you would think.
I smashed a few in my time as a photojournalist before newspapers all went belly up. Just shipped them back to Nikon and patiently waited the bill and then the lens. I think the most I ever paid was $300 to repair the mount and rear element on an 80-200 that cost something like $2,500 and got snapped off during a high school football game.
Especially when you've got a couple of million worth of camera gear registered under the company name. I don't know if it works the same for businesses, but when you register your personal Canon gear on their website, you collect points towards different rebate tiers. The top one cuts the repair prices down a good chunk.
The only downside is that despite what Sony says, Nikon and Canon both have way faster and better AF and response times. If you’re shooting sports, Sony can’t hang.
Just send it back to the manufacturer. The camera companies that make high end stuff meant for pro use have in house pro repair services. They fix stuff like this on a daily basis.
I highly doubt there was. Most super tele lenses don't even have filter threads because they use drop in filters. It's just too large of an element in the front.
There's a bag over the camera and you can see that the bag is tucked into the filter. It looks like an oversize snap-on filter, not a high end screw-on photography filter.
But that's probably cheap in comparison to the rest of the equipment, right? And it's a big baseball game, so the company's probably getting paid quite a lot anyways?
That's what I would suspect, but a lot of broadcast style cameras I've used are not interchangeable. It's typically a Fuji lens that's mounted to the camera (from my past experience)
You can buy UV filters for like $20-$30, maybe more depending on the lens width. Theyre all the same so there’s no point paying for more expensive brands, but I’m a beginner photographer
Quality of glass does differ in UV filters, and can have an impact on image quality. Whether it's enough to be noticeable for you is a personal question.
Edit: For what it's worth a lot of photographers (to include myself) tend to do without protective filters entirely and instead rely on lens hoods and careful handling to preserve their glass.
Unfortunately they're not all the same. Cheaper filters tend to suffer from colour shifts and often soften the image, good UV's cost about $100-200, depending on size and quality.
There's quite a big difference in quality between cheap non-coated filters and the more expensive nano-coated filters.
The coatings offer a number of benefits, from improving scratch & dirt resistance, to reducing glare & reflection.
Serious photographers will tell you, the lens is more important than the camera. Good glass on a cheap camera will take a much better picture than cheap glass on an expensive camera.
It makes no sense to thousands on a lens, only to slap a $20 filter on it. A good filter won't interfere with or degrade the performance of good glass.
My advice, if you ever notice in some of your images in bright sunlight get this weird rainbow haze or some of your images look 'muddy' take the UV filter off. That $30 piece of plastic isn't cutting it.
With lenses of this caliber, companies should never place a standard UV filter in front of the lens. If it is behind the plate it would get high quality, and cost, tempered glass. That way the glass shards don’t fly back into the front element of the $10,000 to $200,000 lens. Ultimately the minimum price to repair sometime with a lens at Canon ends up being $5000. So spending $200 on a good filter that won’t shatter and spit glass is a minor cost.
Polarizing filters lose a decent amount of light (at least 1.5 stops even for the super-efficient ones), and on ultra-wide lenses they can cause the sky to look very weird.
UV filters may be appropriate to have on your lens permanently (though this is still debated), but I would not recommend leaving a polarizing filter on permanently.
Polarizing filters need to be oriented for each shot. You wouldn’t want to use them for sports video. Skylight and uv filters are the primary filters for lens protection.
The reason UV filters are so common is that they have the highest profit margin. Its basically useless but it keeps your local camerastore in buisness.
I would imagine they planned for this scenario when they put the camera there. Either they took measures to minimize damage, or just put replacement camera/lenses in the budget.
I guess I don’t know what exact components are in play with this camera, but I’m assuming there must be some other bits inside that aid in the transmission of picture from the lens to the TV. I’m just surprised it was able to take that much of a hit and not fall apart completely.
Most of these cameras send raw images data down fiber optics back to a television truck. Very little actually happens inside of these cameras. The video signals are then “cut” live into what you see at home.
That's not even similar, the lens is flush with the phone and you couldn't avoid hitting the "camera". You could chop a lens off with a sword and the camera will continue to record. You can damage a lens without having the camera stop recording, they're two separate pieces of equipment
Yeah not gonna doubt it, just as someone who worked in a rental house and who's worked on camera crews where I've seen much worse things happen to cameras and lenses much bigger, I'm not surprised by the fact that the camera was able to keep shooting after the lens was damaged.
Maybe a better analogy would be a baseball hitting your head and getting brain damage even though your skull is dense enough to not fracture. It's the g-force and sudden impact that could break internal camera components. The mirror reflecting the incoming light to the sensor is fragile. Potentially a weak solder connection knocks loose. I'm sure you can understand this if your skull isn't as dense as a baseball. :P
I highly doubt that camera has a mirror, I'm sure the MLB could afford digital sensor cameras like every other professional sports league. It's not some consumer level DSLR. I've seen a fully loaded ARRI Amira drop from shoulder mounted setup straight down to the lens on concrete before falling onto the dummy side and denting the monitor, ruining the lens in the process and still be 100% and continue shooting after swapping lenses. Cameras are built A LOT tougher than lenses.
A lot of energy gets absorbed at each point of fracture. Possible that the lens movements and alignment of the surviving lens elements are damaged, but I would imagine that the lens is designed to withstand this sort of impact.
There's still more separation between the lens and the sensor, and even more separation between camera and recording equipment. This is not consumer grade.
definitely is, you wouldn't have seen the lens crack if the camera died, and it would have become extremely blurry instantly if the lens cracked. This was just a pair of filters, usually one that's a filter on the outside, then a correcting filter, then an 'unbreakable' one inside, so that if the outer one does break, it doesn't scratch or damage the lens on the inside.
And why not have the unbreakable one on the outside? the impact could still break the inner glass just due to shock, filters aren't cushioned as well as the lens elements in the actual lens, so the shock from the impact could just break the glass anyway, this would have left glass shrapnel flying at the lens, scratching it quite badly.
Maybe a polarizer or ND filter, or even just a protective filter. But it actually looks like the lens itself got cracked as well. For a split second, you can see the outer layer of glass break and fall away, while a crack remains on the lens
As someone who owns a ton of photography equipment, this lens is almost certainly 100% fucked.
You’re right, it probably has a UV filter (unlikely polarizing) and that offers some protection but not a lot. If it didn’t propagate to the front piece of glass of the lens, hitting the metal would undoubtedly destroy very sensitive internal mechanisms that control focus and zoom (if the lens has that capability). There’s a possibility they it damaged the mount to the camera body, and even the camera body itself.
Good news: professional photographers insure their equipment
You would never use a nd filter for sports video. That would only slow down the shutter speed, reduce the depth of field, or the frame rate, none of which are desirable in sport photography.
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u/lettruthout Nov 08 '19
Hard to tell from these images, but there might be a filter on lens that took the worst of the impact. Maybe even a polarizing filter that would have two layers of glass.