What I recall is a small company called OCLI which was working for nasa developed the process for the 7 layer coatings and sold the rights to pentax which then held the patent so no one else could make them. Pentax then released the worlds first super multi coated consumer photographic lenses in '71.
----------------- J.C.O'Connell [email protected] ----------------- -----Original Message----- From: PDML [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Godfrey DiGiorgi Sent: Friday, December 21, 2012 1:19 PM To: Pentax-Discuss Mail List Subject: Re: didnt pentax invent multicoating in '71? As I remember an article by Norman Goldberg talking about this (published circa 1979 or so in Modern Photography): The multlayer anti-reflective coating technology was also developed at Zeiss labs in the late 1960s-early 1970s, but Zeiss and Pentax were collaborating on lens design technology at the time in a friendly coopetition so the technology was shared between them. I believe Zeiss holds the basic patents. Zeiss announced and released the T* coatings on their product at just about the exact same time that Pentax announced and released the SMC lenses, they use same coating technologies with different branding and slightly differing manufacturing processes tailored to the individual manufacturer's needs. All the other lens manufacturers licensed the technology from Zeiss and developed their own multicoating techniques based on it too. Rollei called theirs HFT (it was almost exactly Zeiss T* because most of their lenses were manufactured by Zeiss, but using their own branding was less expensive...). Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Minolta, etc, never made a big deal of branding their lens coating technologies the way Pentax and Zeiss did, but post 1972-1973 nearly all the higher-end lenses from every manufacturer had the more expensive multicoatings applied to them. It was necessary to stay competitive. Assuming my memory isn't a fantastical hallucination, that's about the story. ;-) G On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 10:02 AM, Matthew Hunt <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Boris Liberman <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Quoting this article: >> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-reflective_coating >> >> -- start quote >> Interference-based coatings were invented in November 1935 by Alexander >> Smakula, who was working for the Carl Zeiss optics company. Anti-reflection >> coatings were a German military secret until the early stages of World War >> II.[1] Katharine Burr Blodgett and Irving Langmuir developed organic >> anti-reflection coatings in the late 1930s.[citat >> -- end quote > > Those are presumably single-layer coatings. JC is asking about multicoating. > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions. -- Godfrey godfreydigiorgi.posterous.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
