"With the coming of the age of the digital SLR, the elements necessary to achieve the best possible image performance have changed,"
explained Mr.Mamoru Fujimura, the group leader in Olympus's Lens Production Technology Development Department.
"The first thing required is a lens with excellent imaging performance, capable of capturing even the fine details of the subject.
"Next, you need an image sensor that can record the subject captured by the lens with no noise and excellent color separation.
"Finally, you have to have an image-processing engine that can accurately reproduce the subject imaged by the lens and captured by the image sensor right down to the smallest detail.
"Only when you have all three of these elements working together at the highest level is high image quality possible.
"The lens is of particular importance since it is the gateway to the camera and is likely to be used for one or even two decades. Not only must it be optimized for today's cameras, it should be designed with an eye to future developments.
"In other words, the interchangeable lens should be designed with as high performance as possible so that it can deal with any increase in pixels that may result from the improvement of image sensor performance in the future, as well as with existing image sensors.
"ZUIKO DIGITAL lenses are designed with these considerations in mind to achieve high resolution and high performance in combination with currently available digital SLRs, as well as any that are released in the future.
"To create such high-performance lenses, you need lens processing technology with much greater accuracy and quality than could previously be imagined.
"For example, the front lens used with ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 300mm f2.8 is subjected to long hours of polishing using a process with nano-meter-level precision. This process is so precise that it does not permit an irregularity so small it would be equivalent to a hair in an area equivalent to a baseball stadium (like Tokyo Dome).
"Also, in order to fabricate high-accuracy aspherical lenses, the key is the accuracy of mold fabrication.
"With the concave lens with aspherical surfaces on both sides used in ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 7-14mm f4.0, ensuring the accuracy of mold was a very difficult because the lens surface area is more than four times larger than previous lenses.
"But we were able to solve this problem by finishing the mold for the large-aperture aspherical lens at the highest level by taking advantage of the polishing skills of our most experienced craftsmen.
"The final assembly process consisted of high-precision polishing of the optical elements and high-precision machining of the lens tube. We put it all together with the help of the advanced assembling techniques developed by our craftsmen.
The end results of all this are the high-precision, high-quality lenses of Tatsuno."