ARRI Unveils New Ensō Prime Lens Series

ARRI has unveiled its new Ensō Prime lens series, reaching 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.

Ensō lenses combine German precision engineering with Japanese optical excellence. Simplicity and purity of purpose were guiding design principles and inspired the name Ensō, 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.

Whether on a conventionally lit set or on fast-moving, lower-tier productions shot by small crews with minimal lighting, Ensō lenses can be relied upon to produce engaging, well-controlled images. It is this complete dependability in any shooting environment, combined with ARRI’s legendary build quality and climatic tolerances, that gives users the freedom to forget about technical worries and respond to their surroundings with unfettered creativity.

Close focus is a stand-out feature of ARRI Ensō lenses, with an impressive 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 beautiful close-up work, for example on product or food shoots, and the minimised breathing means focus racks have no discernible impact on framing. Stunning bokeh and fall-off round out the lenses’ emotive focus characteristics.

Great care has been taken to balance the many optical parameters defining the native Ensō look, which is sharp and true, yet gentle and natural. But 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. 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.

Packing exceptional optical performance into a diminutive form factor, Ensō lenses are compact, lightweight, and portable, making them fast and easy to work with on set. Gear rings are 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 even the most extreme visual demands.

www.arri.com