Mobile TV Group adds eight Canon lenses

Denver-based sports production company Mobile Television Group recently purchased eight Canon DIGISUPER72xs lenses based on their need for what company President/COO/GM Philip Garvin describes as “day-to-day” use, at an affordable price. Garvin says Canon’s DIGISUPER72xs (model XJ72x9.3BIE-D) long-field HDTV lenses are exactly what the MTVG needs to cover just about any major event in stunning HDTV. MTVG operates 16 mobile units throughout the U.S., focusing primarily on regional sports. Nine of these mobile production trucks are equipped for HDTV production.

“There’s a tendency among lens makers to keep getting bigger and bigger [with zoom ratios],” notes Garvin. “Years ago, the best lens you could get was a 45x zoom. It has gone up exponentially since then, and now you can get a 100x zoom. I’ve been saying for quite a while that even though the big lenses are great, it’s still necessary to have a more economical lens for day-to-day use. We’ve been using Canon lenses of this power for a while now, and we’ve been very happy. About 90 percent of what we do is sports, and for the day-in, day-out sports production, a 72x lens is plenty.”

All Canon DIGISUPER lenses incorporate the company’s second-generation Digital Servo System, which provides microcomputer compensation of lens-focus breathing (the inadvertent alteration of field of view when operating the focus control). All Canon DIGISUPER lenses also benefit from advanced computer-aided design techniques, special optical materials, and proprietary multilayer coatings on each optical element to provide precision HDTV (and SDTV) image-capture performance and heightened long-range zoom capabilities – features that have made Canon a standard of excellence in sports, entertainment, and other live-event production.

Canon’s renowned engineering design optimization strategies ensure that the DIGISUPER72xs lens provides full HDTV image quality while implementing control of focal length over its range of from 9.3mm to 675 mm (up to 1350mm with extender). The design of the DIGISUPER72xs lens also successfully maintains a high MTF (modulation transfer function) profile over the entire image plane when exercising the broad 72:1 focal length change. A parallel Canon engineering-design optimization pays close attention to minimizing chromatic aberrations over this same focal range. Recognizing the especially challenging nature of sports and event coverage (which regularly encounters low-light environments) Canon designed the DIGISUPER72xs lens to achieve an impressive maximum relative aperture of f 1.7.

“The focus, the lighter weight, and the greater zoom range are all improvements we’ve noticed with these lenses,” Garvin says of the DIGISUPER line. Referring to the Mobile Television Group’s DIGISUPER lenses that do include Optical Shift-Image Stabilization, Garvin adds, “The Canon lenses provide such a great image that some of our cameramen even turn off the Image Stabilizer and still get a good picture.”