Rare Nikon 1200mm F11 pops up on eBay

nope, its the length of the rockets it fires :)

Thanks steephill!
That link is from a really fascinating website.

Probably because these lenses are very expensive to make, and they lose money on every lens they make.

Even at $100,000 a lens.... if you only sell a small handful of them, you could lose money.

I would bet that these "Ultra Lenses" were produced for prestige and for the halo effect, and not to generate profits. Think about it. Where is their version 2 or update? If these types of lenses were profitable, the lens makers would have them in their current catalogs.

@Frank_BR That can happen with odd-looking telephotos. I got pulled aside at the Salt Lake City airport and swabbed for explosives because they didn't know what the hell my Canon 150-600mm was.

Which is totally unlike Amazon, which always holds it.

A 2x teleconverter on the canon, which they make, leaves it a quite reasonable 800 f8. A pairing that can even be autofocused on some canon FF DSLR's. 800 and 1200 are pretty close. Even with the teleconverter on, it's almost a stop faster which is generally worth the 0.5x crop in terms of pixel level noise over the same field of view.

It is a collectors item. Any modern long lens would likely be better. It was amazing in its day. On the other hand, the 6mm f/2.8 Nikkor fisheye is still amazing. To my knowledge, nothing before or since matches it. It had a 220 degree field of view so it could actually see behind itself. Now days they go for $60-160K.
http://petapixel.com/2014/11/15/sample-footage-shot-legendary-nikkor-6mm-f2-8-can-see-behind/

Yes, you can do everything today with modern stuff blah blah blah. Why can't people just admire things which were amazing engineering marvels back in the day? I loved my old Nikon catalogues, had great fisheye lenses and mirrored tele's that I would just drool for. Nowadays everything is plastic and everything is done in post.

Is it better now? Depends, the end product certainly is higher quality. But I do have some nostalgia for the days when things were engineered, rather than just programmed. It was part of the fun of photography.

No.

You'd get a 6667mm f/57 lens on a pentax Q Better bring a good tripod made out of concrete.

You won.

The DPR piece cited presents a "Real-world depth-of-field demonstration." They're talking about depth of field, that is, DOF-EQUIVALENCE. This is a matter of geometry, and in my opinion it's very misleading to call this "equivalence" at all. So the Nikon 1200mm f/11 on a micro 4/3 sensor would deliver the same depth of field as an aperture of f/22 on a full-frame sensor. This is to be distinguished from BRIGHTNESS-EQUIVALENCE, which is a matter of optical energetics. An f/11 lens on a FF sensor will be f/11 on an m43 sensor. A third species of equivalence can be termed ANGLE-OF-ACCEPTANCE-EQUIVALENCE, or MAGNIFICATION-EQUIVALENCE. In this sense, the 1200mm f/11 Nikon lens on an m43 sensor will deliver the same magnification as a 2400mm lens on an FF sensor. In summary, our Nikon lens, when used with an m43 sensor, is equivalent, relative to FF, to 2400mm f/11 AS REGARDS EXPOSURE, and to 2400mm f/22 AS REGARDS DEPTH OF FIELD. (I think I've lost the entire room by now.)

"No, it's a 1200 mm f/11 on any format..." But on a 4"x5" camera it would only render a small circle in the middle of the frame.