At CineGear 2024 in Los Angeles, Atlas Lens. Co was showing XCALIBER, which they are touting as the world’s first PL to PL 0.7x Focal Reducer.
XCALIBER allows you to put any PL lens on any PL mount camera and it speed boosts the lens by a factor of 0.7x (1 stop) and it could be used for a wide array of applications. You could take a full-frame lens and put in on XCALIBER and then shrink the image circle onto 4-perf or 16mm film and have more of your image circle covered and get a wider angle field of view. You could also focal reduce Super 35mm lenses onto Super 16 or smaller format sensors like the Panasonic’s GH7’s M4/3.
Above you can watch a live stream to find out more about XCALIBER.
There are limitations to the T-sop you can achieve, but you can still get down to around T1.2.
In some ways, XCALIBER sort of reminds me of the old RedRock Micro and Letus depth of field adapters. While the concept is similar, XCALIBER isn’t re-imaging onto ground glass. Just like a depth of field adapter, Xcaliber is quite large and long. You will get a lot better image quality than you would with a depth of field adapter, but the caveat is that the image is recorded upside down. This is hardly the end of the world as you could just flip it in post or when you are shooting with certain cameras they have the ability to inverse the image scan by the sensor.
Atlas Lens Co. told me that XCALIBER has a lot of modification possibilities and they are excited to see what people will do with it.
At the Atlas Lens Co. booth they had the actual Bausch & Lomb CinemaScope anamorphic lens that was used to film Rebel Without A Cause.
Atlas Lens Co. doesn’t have a price for XCALIBER just yet and they want people out there to tell them how much it should cost. It is expected to start shipping in mid July.
