ARRI has introduced a new line of lenses designed to reach beyond the company’s traditional market to embrace content creators and owner-operators at all stages of their careers. The Ensō Prime lenses are small, portable, and versatile, with a smooth and balanced native look that 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. 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 cinematographers to meet even the most extreme visual demands.

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.

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 minimized breathing means focus racks have no discernible impact on framing. Stunning bokeh and fall-off round out the lenses’ emotive focus characteristics.  ARRI Ensō lenses have been designed and priced to appeal to a wide range of image-makers to offer a safe, long-term investment in lenses that will be versatile and trustworthy career companions putting ARRI quality within the reach of many budget levels. The core set of ARRI Ensō Prime lenses (18, 24, 32, 47, 75, and 105 mm with Ensō Vintage Elements Kit) is available to order now and will begin shipping in November. Learn more at https://www.arri.com/en/cine-lenses/enso-prime-lenses