BTTB: Back to the Basics

In mid-2023, six months after the Simera project, I was planning a different series.

I had been through all kinds of cine lens tests by then, and there was no shortage of "clean" lenses in this world. People were tired of the correct, clean, and boring look of modern optics over the last 10 years — the look needed to be colorful and organic. I believe the biggest value of this brand is to recreate the aesthetics and rendering of different eras through today's approaches. The brand name Thypoch was settled on around that time.

I was touched by the story of Oscar Barnack back then — the man who spent his lifetime trying to make portable lenses and cameras that could fit in people's pockets. Looking at cameras today, they've become much smaller, but lenses, in contrast, have grown bigger. Sakamoto's album BTTB best described my thinking at the time — sometimes a product needs to go back to the basics. So I sketched out the basic concept of the first Eureka lens: a pure double-Gauss spherical 50mm in a collapsible body.

I never could have predicted this project would be so difficult — a lot of mechanical and CMF problems appeared during development. The shame is that we didn't manage to recreate much more of the 1950s character in the rendering. Though it has some swirly effect, I had expected more than that.