Every Lens Their Makers Published, and an Em Dash Where They Did Not

What this is. For some months this desk has been quietly assembling catalogues of camera lenses it does not own, cannot afford, and in most cases has never held. They have been sitting at their own URLs, indexed by nobody, linked from nothing. They are now public, which means somebody should probably explain them.

As of November 2026 there are 421 lenses across six mounts, and nine pages to read them on. Every count below is as of the same month, and the ledgers have not stopped growing.

Why the norm is stupid. Every lens catalogue you have ever used is a shop. The specifications are there to move the unit, the gaps are invisible because a gap does not sell anything, and the one number you actually want (is this the whole list?) is never on the page. Ask a retailer how many lenses exist for a mount and you will be told how many they stock, in a tone suggesting these are the same figure.

They are not the same figure. The distance between them is the only thing on this desk worth printing.

The rule. These pages state what the manufacturer published and refuse to fill the gap when the manufacturer published nothing. Where a maker is silent, the cell holds an em dash, and an em dash is a finding, not a blank. Nobody here estimates a weight. Nobody infers a filter thread from a photograph of the front of the lens. Where a number would be a guess, the guess is omitted and the omission is printed, which is slower, uglier and correct.

The ledgers.

• The Glass: 152 X-mount lenses from 17 manufacturers, 111 of them graded and scored per use. The only page here that holds opinions, and it says so: several of its columns are marked as judgement rather than measurement, on the grounds that a 4/5 for autofocus tracking is an opinion wearing the costume of data.
• Other People’s Glass: 100 Leica M lenses from 6 makers. Manual everything, no contacts, no grades. Not scored by this compiler, who has never once held one of these.
• The One Gap: 7 lenses, all tilt-shift, and 4 candidates rejected with the reasons printed. A sweep of the native line-up found it thinnest in one place: four native lenses tilt or shift, and not one of them says how far it shifts.
• The Bigger Sensor: 35 GF lenses: Fujifilm’s 20, and 15 from other makers in a table of their own. The only ledger where the equivalents come out smaller rather than larger, which reverses the reflex every other page trains.
• The Alliance: 90 lenses from all three founding makers, 57 of them read twice against the makers’ own instruction manuals. The corroboration disagreed in places. Both readings are printed and neither is declared the winner.
• The Thread: 37 M42 lenses from 3 makers, out of 4 documents. Nobody owns a screw thread, so there is no manufacturer to ask; these are the three who left paperwork legible enough to read. Carl Zeiss Jena, Meyer-Optik and Pentacon left none, which is the most misleading thing about the list and is therefore the first thing the page says.
• The Fastest: the X-mount set re-sorted by maximum aperture, for the specific person who sorts by maximum aperture.
• Prices: 132 of them, covering 100 of 152 X-mount lenses and 32 of 100 M-mount. Also four prices nobody published, listed as four prices nobody published.
• Macro Rails: 11 makers, all 11 read from their own sites, 1 declined to say. The ledger recommends ten-times glass and until recently omitted the rail you have to put it on.

The part that matters. The Glass carries a box near the top headed the denominator is not verified, and it is the most important thing on any of these pages. It says: every percentage here is a fraction of the lenses we happen to have listed, and nobody has established that our list is the list. One maker ships 29 X-mount lenses; we hold six. Four makers admitted in November were read against their own whole catalogues first. The other twelve have not been audited against theirs at all.

A missing lens costs nothing on a completeness percentage. That is exactly why it needs saying out loud rather than being left to be noticed.

Present, not complete, and the difference stays on the page. If you find something absent, it is absent. That is a finding too, and this desk would like to hear about it.