"The Tatsuno Plant is mainly in charge of production of lenses and prisms. It's like a workshop for our technical experts.
"At Olympus, the domestic plants hold a joint 'Skills Competition' aimed at improving their skills and disseminating new techniques to everyone.
"People who perform well at the competition are granted titles like MA, Manufacturing Advisor, MS, Manufacturing Supervisor, or MM, Manufacturing Meister.
"But, no matter how skilled an individual is, there's not much they can do without the right techniques.
"In fact," according Mr. Shigeru Mizumoto, "the lens resembles a living thing. It feels hard to the touch, but it is also soft. It distorts easily when it is picked up with fingers.
"If the polishing personnel do not do just the right thing at just the right moment, the lens will not 'grow' properly. What is important here is the skill of the polisher.
"We polish large-aperture lenses manually. We don't use machines. The reason for this is that hand polishing can achieve higher accuracy.
Today, the level of precision required for the lens frame has gone from 2/100mm to 1/100mm and the thickness from 2mm to 1mm, as the performance needed has increased," "We don't want to say 'we can't do it' when the designer asks for something," cut in Mr. Fujimura.
"For example, a designer once made a really difficult request regarding an aspherical lens with uneven thickness. Under the circumstances, we couldn't say 'we can do it!' but we said it anyway, and began the challenge.
"In the end, we successfully met the challenge and were able to commercialize the item designed by the optical development staff in cooperation with the production site.
"Whether the problems were related to the molding machine development, molding conditioning, start of process or introduction in actual site, we solved all of them by actually doing them ourselves.
"The accuracy requirements for the digital SLR are incomparably higher than those for the film cameras.
"At another time, the designer told us,'we recalculated and found that twice the precision is necessary. We need to double the precision of all lenses from now on!'
"But this was beyond the limits of the machinery. So we had to deal with it by doing everything manually.
"Originally, the machinery is designed to specifications determined based on the design and fabricated to meet those requirements. That means it's really hard to respond to requests that exceed the machinery limits."
"At Tatsuno," Mr.Takahiro Mizukawa concluded, "there are many people who really love their work, like those who look as if polishing the lens is their hobby, and those who can read the shape errors below 1/10000mm accurately using the Newton gauge. Their passion infects the people around them, so everybody works harder and with more enthusiasm.
"Indeed," he added, "all of our lenses may be 'over-quality lenses.' That's because we aren't just making them for the E-3. We fabricate lenses with very high performance that will still be usable with its successors."
As he said this, all three engineers nodded in agreement.