ARRI introduces its new Ensō Prime lens series, designed to reach beyond the company’s traditional market to embrace corporate and commercial content creators and owner-operators at earlier stages of their careers. “Small, portable, and versatile, Ensō lenses deliver exceptional images in almost any condition. The beautifully smooth and balanced native look can be tuned with Ensō Vintage Elements, which attach to the back of the lenses, allowing many different looks to be achieved with a single, cost-effective lens set,” the announcement states.
Ensō lenses combine German engineering with Japanese optics. Ensō is named after the circular Zen calligraphy symbol. “Creating an Ensō with a single brushstroke is an expression of nowness that requires emptying one’s mind of distractions and fully committing to the creative flow. ARRI Ensō lenses embody this philosophy by instilling the confidence to put aside technical concerns and focus on capturing the moment,” the release continues.
Designed for conventionally lit sets, fast-moving shoots and lower-tier productions shot by small crews with minimal lighting, Ensō lenses produce engaging, well-controlled images.
Close focus is a stand-out feature of ARRI Ensō lenses, with a magnification ratio of 1:4 on most focal lengths, equivalent to 10” close focus on the 32 mm, which is only 3.7” from the front element. This facilitates close-up work, for example on product or food shoots, and the minimized breathing means focus racks have no discernible impact on framing. Bokeh and fall-off round out the lenses’ emotive focus characteristics.
For projects that require a different look, ARRI provides the Ensō Vintage Elements—interchangeable optics that attach magnetically to the back of Ensō lenses. Far exceeding the scope of conventional filters, they offer quick and easy external lens tuning that incrementally shifts the look and feel of images.
“Building on what ARRI has learned from feedback about its Impression Filters for Signature lenses, Ensō Vintage Elements incorporate significant advantages. They come in more powerful strengths, producing images that are sharper in the center and therefore easier to focus, but with a stronger detuned effect at the edges of frame,” according to the release.
They have encoded chips that convey metadata about shifts of focal length, T-stop, and focus to the camera, and from there to on-set monitors and postproduction. Focus scale changes caused by the Elements can even be compensated for automatically with the ARRI Hi-5 hand unit, whether crews decide to use the included lens shims or not.
The full kit of six Vintage Elements comes as standard with ARRI’s core set of six Ensō lenses. It includes three positive Elements of different strengths, producing smeary, soft-edged bokeh in the background and Petzval-like image swirl at the corners of frame. The three negative Elements have the opposite effect; out-of-focus background highlights have diffuse centers and bright outlines that overlap to create an edgier, more intrusive feel. The kit also includes an Ensō Creative Adapter, which lets users invent their own unique Elements for personalized external lens tuning. It comes with three retaining rings that allow different thicknesses of glass or other material to be used and held securely.
Ensō lenses are compact, lightweight, and portable with gear rings in the same position on all 14 of the Ensō focal lengths, most of which are T2.1 and have a front diameter of 95 mm, so they can be swapped on the camera without disruption. The focal lengths in the core set will be the most frequently used, but the wide-angle 10.5 and 14 mm, as well as the telephoto 250 mm (350/500 mm with its included 1.4x/2x Extenders) allow Ensō shooters to meet extreme visual demands.
ARRI Ensō lenses have been designed and priced to appeal to a wide range of image-makers, putting ARRI quality within the reach of corporate shoots, documentaries, and commercials that cannot afford big budgets or crews.
The core set of ARRI Ensō Prime lenses (18, 24, 32, 47, 75, and 105 mm with Ensō Vintage Elements Kit) is available to order now and will begin shipping in November.
Learn more at https://arri.com/enso
