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Cooke Optics
British cinema glass with a recognisable rendering signature.
manufacturer · Leicester, UK · Est. 1893
About
Cooke Optics
Cooke Optics traces back to 1893 in Leicester, England, when H. Dennis Taylor designed the Cooke Triplet for Taylor, Taylor & Hobson. The cinema-lens business carries on under the Cooke Optics name today, with manufacturing still based in Leicester.
Cooke's modern catalogue covers the spherical S4/i and S7/i Full Frame Plus prime sets, the Anamorphic /i family, the Mini S4/i, and the recent SP3 full-frame primes aimed at indie and episodic budgets. Across the range the lenses are tuned for what the industry refers to as the "Cooke Look": warm, gentle skin-tone rendering with shallow falloff and forgiving close-focus characteristics.
Cooke's /i Technology metadata standard — the lens-data protocol that exposes focus distance, aperture, and zoom position to the camera body — was adopted across the industry and now appears in lens lines from Zeiss, Leica and others.
Catalog
3 series · 17 items
Lenses
Cooke S4/i was launched in the early 2000s as Cooke Optics' modernisation of the S4 family — the same optical formula but with an updated PL mount, /i Technology metadata, and improved coatings. The set covers 18, 25, 32, 40, 50, 75, 100, 135, 150, 180 and 300mm primes, all at T2.0, with a uniform 110mm front diameter that lets follow-focus and matte-box rigging stay constant across focal lengths. The lenses are tuned for Super 35 coverage (image circle ≈ 31.5mm) and have appeared on a long list of features that span everything from Birdman (where Lubezki paired them with the ALEXA M for the apparent-single-take Broadway sequences) to Midsommar (Pawel Pogorzelski) and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. The S4/i line has been largely superseded for full-frame work by the S7/i Full Frame Plus, but it remains in heavy rotation on Super-35 and 4-perf 35mm productions.
Cooke S7/i Full Frame Plus is Cooke's full-frame extension of the S4/i family, launched in 2017 to cover the new ALEXA LF, ALEXA 65, Sony VENICE and RED Monstro sensors at full image circle. The set covers 16, 18, 21, 25, 27, 32, 40, 50, 65 Macro, 75, 100, 135, 150, 180 and 300mm primes — T2.0 across the spherical range — at a 46.31mm image circle. The "Plus" in the name refers to the extra coverage beyond ALEXA 65's open-gate active area (54.12mm), which the S7/i covers at the centre with attenuation toward the corners. The lenses have been used on Tenet, Wonder Woman 1984, and a substantial portion of the recent A24 prestige slate.
References
Further reading
- Cooke Optics — Wikipediawikipedia
- Cooke /i TechnologyCooke Opticsstudio page
- Inside Cooke's Leicester factoryfxguidefxguide