In film and photography, a prime lens is either a photographic lens whose focal length is fixed, as opposed to a zoom lens, or it is the primary lens in a combination lens system.
Confusion can sometimes result due to the two meanings of the term if the context does not make the interpretation clear. Alternative terms primary focal length, fixed focal length, and FFL are sometimes used to avoid ambiguity.
Read more about Prime Lens: As Alternative To Zoom Lens, Traditional Meaning As Primary Lens, Popular Focal Lengths, Specialist Lenses
Famous quotes containing the word prime:
“If one had to worry about one’s actions in respect of other people’s ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)