The lensmeisters have been busy at Fujinon. They’ve gone from 14.5 to 400 mm in a very short time—producing the Fujinon Premier line of four ultra-fast, ultra-sharp PL-mount zooms  as well as the Alura PL partnership with ARRI.

New at NAB will be Fujinon’s new 19-90 mm T2.9 lightweight PL-mount zoom lens. I believe it is has the longest range (19-90) of any lightweight zoom. It’s part of Fujinon’s Premier line, and is called Cabrio—as in cabriolet—convertible.

The convertible part is the quickly removable zoom handgrip. Similar to ENG/EFP servo drives, it has built in lens motors for focus, iris, and zoom. A rocker controls the zoom.

This is new territory for PL mount zoom lenses. The Cabrio could be helpful in handheld and documentary style shooting–on lighter cameras with electric “hot shoe” contacts in the lens mount. I always winced at the idea of holding a camera by its lens–but maybe my mind will be changed at NAB–especially on cameras that may be as light as the lens itself.

If you’re using the lens with Preston, Arri, Hedén, Servicevision, or cmotion systems, you can detach the handgrip system. Cabrio will have LDS and /i metadata for zoom, iris and focus lens information. See Fujinon’s new Cabrio PL Zoom at Fujifilm Optical Devices’  NAB Booth C7525.