Because of the precision wanted to fabricate them, the extra money you’re keen to spend on a digicam lens, the higher the product and photographic outcomes you’re going to get. For not less than one photographer, no sum of money is an excessive amount of cash to spend on high-quality glass, as an extremely rare Canon lens not too long ago sold at auction for nicely over half-a-million {dollars}.

According to the itemizing by Wetzlar Camera Auctions, when this monstrous EF 1200mm f/5.6L USM super-telephoto prime lens (which means it supplied no zoom capabilities) was launched in 1993, Canon described it as “The world’s largest interchangeable SLR-AF lens, both in terms of focal length and maximum aperture” which is why, even again within the ‘90s, it bought for a staggering $90,000.

Targeted at sports activities photographers and even hen watchers with deep pockets to fund their passion, the lens paired superb telephoto capabilities with the power for photographers to make use of a comparatively quick shutter to freeze the motion they have been capturing from afar. But it was obtainable solely as a particular order product as a result of it took Canon over a 12 months to construct every lens at a median manufacturing fee of about two lenses yearly. (You can safely assume the deposit was pretty hefty.) Canon has by no means formally shared how most of the 1200mm lenses it produced, however whereas it was undoubtedly lower than 100, many imagine that quantity is definitely nearer to simply 20 primarily based on what number of have been noticed within the wild.

Over the previous few a long time only a few of the lenses have come up on the market, though B&H Photography sold one in 2009 for $120,000, and one other in 2015 for $180,000, twice the unique promoting value. Canon has lengthy since stopped producing the lens, and their shortage is sort of actually what sparked a bidding struggle between two events for this explicit unit which was nonetheless in distinctive, nearly new situation. The remaining promoting value was €500,000, or a bit of over $576,000 in US funds, which Wetzlar Camera Auctions claims is the best value a digicam lens at public sale has ever bought for.