Zeiss today announced a new member of their highly acclaimed Otus family: the new 28mm f/1.4 Otus lens. Together with the 55mm f/1.4 and the 85mm f/1.4, this lens completes the trio of Otus manual focus lenses, which provide exceptional image quality for Canon and Nikon users.

From the official press release:

The lens consists of 16 elements in 13 groups. One of the lens elements has an aspheric optical surface and one element is aspheric on both sides. Eight other lens elements are made of special glass. The basis of the optical design is a Distagon. The special glass has anomalous partial dispersion, as is typical for an apochromatic lens. This corrects the longitudinal chromatic aberrations superbly, which therefore lie considerably below the tightly defined boundaries. Bright-dark transitions in the image, in particular highlights, are depicted almost completely free of color artifacts. The floating elements design (the change of distances between certain lens elements when focusing) allows for unrivaled imaging performance along the entire focusing range, from 0.3 m (11.81”) to infinity.

Retail price for the upcoming 28mm f/1.4 Otus lens is still unknown, but if you’re thinking so much “special” glass sounds expensive, you couldn’t be more right. Otus lenses have traditionally been priced in the several thousand-dollar range, with the Nikon mount version of the 55mm f/1.4 coming in at a hair under $3,850, and the 85mm f/1.4 at a little under $4,400. Both Canon mount versions are a few hundred dollars cheaper, but still comfortably over the $3,000 mark, so not exactly cheap either.

By all accounts, fine glass is expensive, but in the case of the Otus family, it really doesn’t get any better than that. If you’re a working photographer that needs the absolute highest quality possible this side of Medium Format, this is where you’ll find it.