Attached Link: http://www.canon.com/camera-museum/tech/l_plant/main.html

This has probably been seen before in this forum but I thought it might be interesting to all Canon lens owners. Nice video of a plant in Japan where they walk you through the making of Canon lens from raw material to final product focusing on the 500mm IS 4.0 L lens.  Might give you some idea of why their lens cost so dang much!

Aloha`

Wow! I am impressed!

Fascinating! Thanks for the link.

it was very interesting

I am impressed at how the glass comes out speck free. Quality control has to be quite strict.

Have seen this before Dave...funnily enough, am sending my EF500 in for a service in a few weeks time :)

I watched all of this with complete fascination!

I was amazed at the glass making process, as well as all the steps involved in manufacturing a lens!

This makes me appreciate a little bit more why these lenses are as expensive as they are!

Thanks for sharing this, makes me proud I chose Canon instead of another brand.

I wonder if Nikon has anything like this, or do they just have a few old men somewhere working on glass with old files and sandpaper - ha ha!

Now that's damn funny...All I know is I love my Canon lens...solid, sharp, and very well built.

Actually, Canon farms out the work to the Nikon plant, that is why the demo is a virtual demo, not images of the real plant.         

Humm..maybe I just made this up...

Actually, quality control of glass production is extra critical here for either Canon or Nikon. Critical also  for auto glass..yeppie, windshields and auto windows, btw.  A Dupont autoglass  plant I know of lost its glass making contracts because of old equipment and unwillingness to update by the union workers, fearrful of lost jobs.  Well, all the jobs were lost and the speck free glass for autos was done in Japan, glass qualities Dupont could not produce at the time with current tooling.