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| LENS WITHOUT VERTICAL VERTIGO: MacromaX stands upright. Lenshood keeps front element at right height from subject. LEDs provide ringlighting, courtesy 2CR5 battery. Can you use it horizontally? Sure you can. |
What’s so hot about LEDs? Actually, they’re not hot at all. An incandescent bulb uses a burning filament, which creates a good amount of lost heat and has a fairly short life before it burns out. LEDs, on the other hand, have semi-conductor filaments, often made of aluminum gallium arsenide that last as long as transistors. In every way, they’re really cool. Recently, the cost of manufacturing LEDs has dropped considerably; hence the growing profusion in larger, more powerful, but reasonably priced LED flashlights.
Where will LEDs show up in photography? In tiny camera cell phones, which need flash to shoot in poor light. Regular electronic flashtubes are much too large, and the power drain is far, far greater than the tiny batteries in camera phones can accommodate.
But the prize for being the first to use LEDs for photographic lighting goes to Tadashi Goto, president and founder of Goko Camera Company, Ltd. His LED brainchild: the revolutionary Goko MacromaX LZ3-2 Ultra Macro Zoom lens, an ultraclose-up lens for both 35mm and digital SLRs that provides a continuously sharp single-zoom-aperture magnification from 0.8X to 2.4X, at effective apertures from f/27 to f/49. Eighteen LEDs around the front circumference of the lens, powered by house current or a 2CR5 lithium battery, furnish the picture light. For a subject having the equivalent of 18-percent gray reflectance, the TTL-metered exposure on ISO 200 film at f/27 is about 1/10 sec. At f/49, it’s 1/3 sec. The actual aperture hole is 2mm in diameter; focus distance from the front of the lens is 30mm. A sunshadelike hood keeps the subject at precisely this distance.
The MacromaX LZ3-2 (about $500 street) will be available with various major SLR lensmounts this year, initially in Europe. My tests of an early preproduction model yielded extremely sharp pictures of outstanding color quality from center to edge at all marked magnifications: 0.8X, 1X, 1.25X, 1.50X, 1.75X, 2X, and 2.4X.
The MacromaX LZ3-2 produces continuous light, of course. But with virtually every major photo equipment manufacturer in Japan trying to come out with tiny-but-adequate instant LED flashes for camera cell phones, can more powerful LEDs for pop-up flash in SLRs be far behind? Maybe we can even get rid of those big shoe-mounted monsters with their four AA cells. I’ve always thought they looked awkward perched uncomfortably atop prism hot-shoes.
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