Canon’s EF Lens Work III book says the same. In their diagram the fluorite element is the third from the front of the lens.

The product page for the f/4L IS does as well:
http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=ModelInfoAct&fcategoryid=150&modelid=14260

Now you may accuse them of fraud, but the burden of proof is upon you to substantiate your claims. As for the relative merits of ED/Super ED vs. Fluorite, I am not qualified to discuss them, and I suspect neither are you. Nikon has used fluorite in the past as in their 300mm medical imagery lens. Even Nikon only claims robustness, lower cost and reduced sensitivity to temperature as advantages of ED technology (which is basically a blend of glass and fluorite, and thus extremely hard to produce consistently from one melt to another).

As for Zeiss using fluorite due to lack of access to specialty glass, I’m sorry but that statement is laughable. Zeiss is a sister company of Schott, probably the highest end glass maker in the world. Both are owned by the Carl Zeiss Stiftung charitable trust, established by Ernst Abbe, the University of Jena optics professor who also happens to be the pioneer in the use of fluorite to correct for chromatic aberration.

Canon definitely makes glass and crystals through its subsidiaries Ohara and Optron. The complex structure of japanese keiretsus can be confusing, e.g. Nikon gets its AF-S motors from Mitsubishi but they are part of the same extended family.

As for Christian Buil, I have no affiliation with the guy, and have no idea where he studied. It is possible but unlikely he does not understand Nikon settings given the lengths he has gone to in order to avoid automatic dark frame substraction in his other article on the D70. That said, profanity-laced ad hominem attacks do not do much for your credibility. From some cursory Google searches, his credentials are quite impressive, from checking his list of publications, at least one book that was translated in English (http://www.willbell.com/ccd/ccd4.htm), his IRIS astrophotography software, and the fact he is an optics expert for the CNES and the Pic du Midi observatory and generally working with CCDs well before either of us even graduated from high school.

Please don’t bring my alma mater into this. It’s spelled École Polytechnique, by the way, and the other school is the École Normale Supérieure Ulm-Sèvres (the presumably inferior Écoles Normales only train elementary school teachers). There are other fine French schools that specialize in optics and astronomy, e.g. Sup Optique, the alma mater of Angénieux, where Alain Aspect has his lab. Perhaps you have heard of him?. As for French-bashing, I guess I was mistaken in thinking it was the exclusive preserve of red-state philistines.

I like Nikon, they make fine optics and cameras, but Nikon fanboyism is just as tiresome as that of Canon or Leica.

Are you 100% sure of the statement that the 70-200mm f/4L IS uses fluorite crystal in one of their elements? Let me explain.

Here is the Canon marketing literature on it. The summary is I mentioned that fluorite elements in photgraphic lenses is a marketing claim by Canon that does not stand the smell test because 1) Nikon ED class was available before Canon introduced fluorite elements, and 2) ED elements back then can combine to create the same apochromatic, 3) newer ED glass have almost identical dispersion characteristics as fluorite without the manufacturing cost and fragility it entails.

In other words the only reason Canon and Zeiss bothered to copy this technology from the astronomy world was because they were excluded themselves from more economical high-index specialty glass (by patents or by choice).

Read the literature closely, where does it say the 70-200mm f/4L or the 70-200 f/2.8L IS for that matter use fluorite (they do use UD glass, which is what Canon switched to when ED patents expired), especially since Canon no longer has glass manufacturing capability (photographic glass is still made by Cosina, Hoya (Tokina/Pentax), and Nikon.)

If I’m wrong, please correct me, otherwise I posit that this is more myths of the white lens.

By the way the very first line of the Astronomy article you reference is absolute bullshit. First the “filtering” above 1 second is entirely optional (it is a custom menu) and the second is that the moron doesn’t even know why this occurs which leads me to believe the guy must have failed his astronomy course! All astrophotography does digital subtraction of black point exposure, the difference here is Nikon offeres it “in camera” and the Canon is superior to the Nikon D80, etc. because it is a CMOS sensor instead of a CCD. CCD sensors are lower noise (even in long exposure astrophotography) than CMOS, but the CCD requires an image processing sensor which operates on the order of a volt (as to millivolts for the same processing to be done on the CMOS chip itself). In high end astronomy work, the processing chip and the CCD are separated and the CCD is often liquid cooled to eliminate the photodetectors extreme sensitivity to heat. This is impractical for a consumer digital camera resulting in a CMOS chip being better for night photography.

I mean the guy is fucking lying (and he must know it or he’s an incompetent astronomer) in his very first sentence! (Note, I’m not disagreeing with the conclusion that a Canon 20Da is superior to say an 80D for astrophotography, but remember the D300 and D3 both have CMOS so are going to be the same and all late model Nikons and all Canons other than the 20Da have a ultra strong cut filter that needs to be removed for serious astrophotography).

Why hasn’t anyone called him out on this? Is it because he’s French? Geez, I hope he didn’t go to Ecole Normale or Ecole Polytechnic because those uni’s went down in my book if so (if he didn’t go to those schools, then how the hell is he qualified to even talk about this stuff).

The guy needs to crack open his f—king manual and look up “Long Exposure NR = off” (which addresses all his previous and future “dark current” bullshit) and “Active D-lighting = off.” (which is why his “display vs. actual” ISO measurements are off. The manual clearly states with Active D-lighting on, the image is underexposed). He is the science equivalent of a criminal.

Only Zeiss and Canon master the technology for photographic lenses, and a few specialty houses like Takahashi for very expensive but wonderfully corrected fluorite apochromatic refractor telescopes.

http://www.astrosurf.com/buil/nikon_test/test.htm

Yeah, I was a little harsh on you. It was clear you knew what you were talking about, but I just had to pick a single nit you mentioned haphazardly in the conclusion (nobody called you out on the difference between clipping/dynamic range and luminance resolution). Besides, you wrote that article a long time ago so it’s understandable (though it bugged me that nobody pointed it out).

As for the part that is unrelated to this post…

I was planning on writing an article on the Active D-lighting (this is the “preprocessing” Christian Buil is talking about) since I’ve had to explain it so many times to people. In my opinion it actually is a “breakthrough” because the preprocessing is done on the sensor in analog space while the sensor is being detected, instead of the in-camera RAW file digital postprocessing. The D200 also did that with color space (which got overshadowed by the whole “white balance encryption” controversy). It is not “cooked” in any way because you can turn the burner off (simply turn off Active D-lighting), did he remember to do that? Did he acknowledge that processing in analog space must be done in all cameras so there is no way not to cook a RAW? Hmm…

(I do have one complaint though, the way it works is that the sensor gains up as the data is being collected when that pixel is dark meaning the image is slightly underexposed. That seems a little backward. Ideally you’d want to attenuate the photosite as it fills up allowing for slight overexposure.)

In any case, the proof is “in the pudding.” It is incontrovertable that no matter what Christian and other Canonophiles say that the D3 can take photographs that the 5D (which is basically the same quality sensor) can’t take no matter how much postprocessing is done.

When Canon introduced image stabilization and piezoelectric autofocus motors, a lot of Nikonites were saying why it’s crap and how it can’t replace a good tripod or freeze the subject, blah blah. And I called them out on that. The criteria I use is simply, “If my camera had that feature, would I be adverse to using it” the answer in the case of of IS and USM is “yes” which is why we have VR and SWM today.

Are we going to honestly stipulate that Canon photogs wouldn’t use Active D-lighting and nanocrystal coatings? I don’t see any of their L lenses with fluorite crystal anymore. Hmm…

Highlights are where digital sensors are the strongest except when clipped which has nothing to do with lossy vs. lossless compression.

When I say sensors are weakest in the highlights, I was precisely referring to the fact digital sensors clip harshly, unlike the more gradual shoulder of film. Film is more forgiving of overexposure (well, negative film), whereas digital sensors give better shadow detail than film.

As for the visual system, it is even more amazing in how it uses saccades, short but extremely rapid eye movement to build a high-resolution picture from an essentially 6MP sensor, with some very fancy processing in the visual cortex to mask the fact our eyes are shifting over ten times per second. They also have the original idea for the SuperCCD HR with our rods and cones…

It’s funny - we both live in San Francisco, both have a M8 and a D3. I haven’t experimented with the lossy NEF compression in my D3, but each NEF file actually has the quantization curve built-in, so this is conceivably something that could be changed from one firmware release to another.

You might be interested in this article from astrophotographer Christian Buil, which concludes much of the D3’s high-ISO performance is actually from preprocessing in the camera itself and that the intrinsic sensor capabilities are similar to Canon’s, not a breakthrough. It would not surprise me too much as sensors are close to the physical limits (the M8 is not a particularly good camera for high ISO, but its detective quantum efficiency in the green channel is already 40%), I am not sure whether I agree entirely with his conclusions, but it is clear even the lossless or uncompressed NEFs are actually cooked.